Pearlie the Park Fairy: Saphira's New Assignment
by Eduard Tubin
Summary: Azula and Karo serve as a fairies in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone - what is called an Involuntary Park. Saphira joins them because she finally goes to far to scheme against Pearlie the Park Fairy. Together they must solve a series of squirrel murders
1. Chapter 1

**Pearlie the Park Fairy**

**Saphira's New Assignment – Chapter 1**

"Why do you get up five times a night?" Azula asked her fellow park fairy Karo as she prepared herself for another day as park fairy by making certain her gold trimmed, black vest, boots and the rest of her uniform looked intimidating. "My dreams are alive with the sound of flushing!"

"The ol' prostate keeps acting up." Karo said as he combed his hair and pushed his glasses up his nose. "You know that I think we got screwed by the cosmic whatever runs the show when we got assigned to the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone_ as park fairies. How does this hole count as a park since persons seldom come here."

"Karma? You sound like a wood nymph or an overly wild elf." Azula straightened her hairpin and fluttered her transparent rose colored wings. "Hurry up. We have park inspection." Karo and Azula lived in a set of holes carved out of a tall oak tree and Fairy HQ punished them as a set. Karo was Azula's cousin and they had grown up together, served in the same park and ended up in the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone_ as park fairies for the same reasons. They made the best of it and had arranged the hole in the tree into a nice home they tried their best never to leave. Karo had shown his talent for scavenging by finding as much lead as he could use as shielding against the invisible dangers of the 'zone'.

"I didn't _do_ anything wrong as far as I can tell." Karo fixed his Fire Nation gold hairpin in place. "Fairy HQ disagreed with you when you took such stern measures with the rats. As I remember; you tied the most disorderly ones to a board and I merely poured water over their heads."

"I had to teach the worst of those rats a lesson to keep the others in line. Fairy HQ wants all the parks in Fairyland in perfect order but then they limit my methods. The elders took no account of practical difficulties and so they punished me. Guilt by association meant you were punished as well."Azula complained as she checked her black and red robes and double checked to make certain Karo had not mucked up his collar. "You bring this up all the time and my answer is always the same."

"_The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone? _Always seemed a bit harsh of a punishment in my eyes." Karo fluttered his wings to stretch them and get some blood flowing into them. Fairy HQ and the Fairy Elders defined the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone _as an involuntary park. The persons had abandoned it after the nuclear disaster and it had reverted to its natural state. This made it a draw for tourists wishing to see wildlife and naturalists wishing to study the ecology of the region as it might have been before human meddling. Karo never understood the reasoning behind the inclusion of the _Exclusion Zone _as a park and he griped a good deal about his lot as a prisoner within it.

Azula fluttered her wings. "We have to visit the Sarcophagus and count the birds living there. We haven't done a count since early spring and if Fairy HQ doesn't receive an update for the beginning of summer we might get a visit from that jackass Gobsmack." She looked at Karo. "I keep hearing life is fragile but it bloody well astonishes me with its determination to keep living in places sanity would rule out. Those birds absorbed a radiation dose which could kill a person in a week and yet go about their business as if it doesn't matter." Azula never expressed any remorse for her harsh treatment of the rats in her park and accepted her posting here. The Fairy Queen herself had insisted on this punishment and Fairy HQ made sure she served it. Fairy HQ struck her as an idealistic, out of touch group of meddlers who completely missed the point when it came to keeping order. Azula knew order came from a stern and rigid hand applying set rules with strict punishments for breaching them. She liked her posting in the _Exclusion Zone_ since Fairy HQ left her largely alone and she seldom had to make any effort to keep order.

"Can't we simply lie about the numbers?" Karo suggested.

Azula patted Karo's back as a kind of morning ritual that meant '_watch my back_'. "We have park patrol."

"Message for the Chernobyl Park Fairies." Just as they opened the round wooden door, they found a dragonfly hovering in front of the cozy hole in the mutant oak tree the fairies in charge of the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone_ called home. He buzzed around with urgency and kept repeating his message. The Delivery Dragonfly dropped a yellow envelope off just outside the front door and left swiftly in an act of self preservation.

Azula picked up the yellow envelope and snickered. Karo remembered the snicker as the same one she had used when the Fairy Elders had ordered them to come here.

"Gobsmack the Head Goblin" Azula began.

"This won't end well." Karo tightened his hands into fists. "Kill me now and I'll try my luck making a living as an intestinal parasite." Gobsmack had the responsibility of keeping Azula and Karo in check, giving them tasks and reporting to the elders on their conduct. Azula regarded him as a needless bureaucratic meddling civil servant with bad taste in clothes (although she used other words which were ruder). She made certain Karo spent most of the time with him which made Karo very miserable, uptight and gave him stomach complaints. Karo knew Chernobyl consisted of a poisoned realm and could never be fixed by any form of magic. Gobsmack always wanted improvements made to the abandoned parks and fields of the _Zone_ to please persons despite the fact more than a day in said park or field would kill a person. Gobsmack always filed his report which stated all of the bad things in the park. Karo doubted Fairy HQ would ever let them leave.

"Fairy HQ...blah blah blah" Azula read dully through the introductory prose which said little and summed up the last paragraph. "Saphira and Ludwig will come here as punishment for severe misconduct."

"We're not a park" Karo uncurled. "We're the land the persons said no one should ever live on since they could develop parts in odd places."

"Yes..." Azula dryly intoned. "How badly did these two screw up to get sent here."

* * *

><p>"How big is Russia?" Saphira complained as her long black hair streamed out in the cold Russian wind.<p>

The sad answer to that question was 'bloody big' but Ludwig chose to remain silent on that. Hour after hour on the back of a dragonfly revealed trees, pine trees, the odd railway to nowhere and trees. Saphira had given up on giving the place a scale and assumed it would end in an ocean somewhere. She had screwed up big time to lose her spa, her position as second fairy and get a training seminar from the park fairies in Chernobyl. Technically Chernobyl was a park but not the kind of park made for pleasant visits but rather the kind of park made to keep people at a distance because the oak trees had an abnormal biochemistry. Saphira hung onto the dragonfly hoping the flight would soon end.

It didn't.

Hour after hour dragged by as Saphira contemplated her fate and wished she could shove Ludwig the bat off the dragonfly but he could fly so he would not make a nice splat noise in the Siberian wilderness. Saphira had tried one too many times to scheme against her cousin Pearlie and Fairy HQ and Gobsmack decided she merited punishment. She had anticipated the typical stern warning and then the need to bribe Gobsmack. She had not anticipated that Chernobyl needed a spa fairy.

Fate puked on her. On the surface, this was a promotion since she would have a spa that would service a huge area. That the huge area had no persons and constituted a toxic zone didn't count in the equation. That she had to learn new names for new toxic isotopes didn't matter – Cesium had a half life of - so what?

Pearlie and Opal had a nice life in a lush city park.

She had to spend part of her life in a nuclear disaster zone.

She had to cope with fairies even more neurotic than Jasper. The Chernobyl park fairies had a reputation for being insufferable and not quite mentally right.

The head park fairy Azula could kill with an insult. She had her assistant Karo who could kill by sheer incompetence. Saphira knew them both by reputation and by the lecture Gobsmack had given her. Azula had a promising career as a park fairy but went overboard on the quest for order and done unspeakable acts to raucous rodents. Saphira had made trouble for Pearlie and usually suffered a few inconveniences and scolding from Gobsmack. Gobsmack made sure to tell her that Azula would simply slug her in the face (or far worse) if she tried to pull anything but he didn't elucidate on the _far worse_ bit. Karo had grown up as half elf and half fairy but trained as a park fairy and served with Azula. Karo had all it took to become a great park fairy but he had followed Azula's orders one too many times. She imagined like all elves, twenty years in a nuclear wasteland had turned him quite odd.

Three or four time zones later, the dragonfly began a slow turn south.

"Prepare to jump!" The dragonfly said politely.

"What happened to service with a smile?" Saphira asked sarcastically.

"Welcome to Chernobyl." The dragonfly banked suddenly. "Grab your bags, your bat and prepare to depart."

* * *

><p>The Sarcophagus as the Soviet engineers had named the containment structure offered plenty of fine places to explore for the curious fairy. Karo didn't have curiosity but Azula enjoyed being witness to the massive manner in which persons had screwed up. The Sarcophagus wasn't dead: it had swifts, swallows and blackbirds nesting in the steel roof. They flew in and out of the bus sized holes in the roof. These holes weren't acts of carelessness but existed to allow heat out should the dead reactor come back to life. The thick concrete walls provided protection from the elements and kept the destroyed mess of dust, steam pipes, graphite and machinery from spilling out. Even persons found the scale of the Soviet nuclear reactor intimidating, the two park fairies found it almost beyond their ability to grasp and had developed mental defenses to cope with it. Azula the Park Fairy unlike Pearlie the Park Fairy had always had sociopathic tendencies and her lack of empathy for most living things allowed her to get on rather nicely. Karo grumbled and complained and then fell into bouts of depression until Azula gave him busy work such as tending to roses (a civil engineering project in the Zone).<p>

Reactor Four had contained one hundred and forty tons of Uranium fuel in a concrete cup like room the size of a two story house filled with graphite. A botched safety test had caused the reactor to explode and in an irony of physics had scattered all of it over a vast area. Azula and Karo had a higher level of protection flying over the huge but empty reactor cauldron than venturing into some parts of the nearby woods. Persons spent months collecting the fuel rods and graphite from the woods nearby. Long before they had finished the clean up; the forest had died. In spite of this massive cleanup effort, Karo or Azula would stumble on a piece of reactor sitting in the middle of a dead patch of grass in a field from time to time.

"We have guests coming over." Karo fluttered his wings to emphasize his point.

Azula knew better than her winged assistant. "No one gets a post here unless they screw up. Reveal yourself to persons and get a nice landfill to run, you murder a few rats and impale their heads on a spike and get sent here." Azula fluttered her transparent rose wings. "Fairy HQ only sends the really incompetent fairies and elves to serve here."

"You murdered rats?" Karo landed on a huge upturned steel lid that once had contained all of the badness inside reactor four.

"One has to enforce law and order." Azula said dryly. "Quit worrying! I left a note so our guests would come here to find us."

The reactor lid Karo walked across had the name Yelena as a kind of dark joke only persons understood. He had gone with Azula to care for the exclusion zone because no sane fairy or elf would go there and because he went everywhere Azula went for protection – his more than hers. He found the abandoned reactor site and the whole exclusion zone a dark and dreary place but Azula needed his help to tend to the park. She had some unpleasant duties including caring for the birds living in the reactor vault since Fairy HQ kept information on births, deaths and mutations. She did her duties out of a desire to avoid idle boredom not duty. Karo held the clipboard, kept a sharp eye out for anything big and took notes.

"Ew!" A voice rang out in the damp, dark and dank reaches of the sarcophagus.

"If that is the voice of the new arrival," Azula fluttered over a radioactive graphite block. "Your hair does grow back – kind of."

"I am Saphira and I once ran a spa for the most fashionable guests," The dainty fairy in the blue spider web skirt hovered over Karo. She looked exotic with her long, straight black hair, blue jeweled earrings and nearly perfect wings. "They sent me here because Fairy HQ wanted me to provide my exclusive services for the fairy folk here."

"All two of us?" Azula flew next to Karo. "That you tried to run Pearlie the Jubilee Park Fairy out of the park by flood, pestilence and sheer nastiness had nothing to do with it then?"

"Indeed." Saphira said curtly. "Ludwig!"

"I should help you find a decent place to stay." Karo offered. "The Sarcophagus provides shelter but the radiation shortens the lifespan and some of the trees have taken to eating small creatures. You must take care around here."

"What happened here?" Saphira asked with irritation.

"A botched safety test," Azula fluttered next to the dark looking fairy. "They wanted to test safety features on the reactor to see if they worked and they found out they didn't. The reactor exploded and spewed radioactivity over a wide area. Fairy HQ considers the _Exclusion Zone_ a park of sorts but persons never come here unless they want an abnormally high white blood cell count."

"Ew!" Saphira said sarcastically.

"Indeed Mistress." Ludwig flapped overhead with Saphira's luggage strapped to his back. He still wore his red tie and glasses and hoped to continue his services as a kind of butler.

_The Exclusion Zone_ had some attractive features since short lived, small creatures like birds didn't live long enough to suffer the worst effects of the radiation and the area around the reactor offered a kind of refuge for wildlife. Even a pack of wolves had made the _Exclusion Zone_ into a home. Unlike the civilized realm of Jubilee Park, the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone_ had a wild edge that made an African Safari or shark diving without a cage seem like tame alternatives. Between wild creatures, mutant trees and radioactive areas that could kill a living thing in under an hour, a fairy had to take care. Azula had a fondness for the haunted regions of the abandoned city of Pripyat and the reactor and Karo liked not having to worry constantly about persons seeing him.

Ludwig felt instantly dirty. Radioactive dust hung in the air and he noticed the dead trees downwind of the reactor complex. "Mistress? We should go no?" He had their luggage tied on his back and he wanted to rest his weary wings but he didn't want to do so inside a dead nuclear power plant.

"You!" Saphira snapped her fingers, "you with the green wings! I need your help to find a place to stay."

"Go Karo!" Azula held her hand out and Karo handed her the clipboard and pencil. "I'll fake - er - finish these counts. I'll be home later."

* * *

><p>"Welcome to the <em>Chernobyl Exclusion Zone<em>," Karo flapped his wings enthusiastically as he flew over the city of Pripyat and the gray, collapsing Soviet era apartment blocks. "I would hope you would enjoy your stay but that seems like a remote possibility. I heard Japan has a park like this too. I suppose persons have their reasons."

"Why did the persons leave this city?" Ludwig huffed under the load of the bags but managed to keep up. He felt an eerie chill come over him and a mood of dull horror pervaded this place. He saw no persons and the animals acted as if they had nothing to worry about. Rats darted across the cracked and aging pavement of the streets looking in piles of person's junk for food.

"The nuclear reactor down the road blew up." Karo said sadly as he repeated the story in briefer form. He found it odd that a bat from the English speaking world had a German accent but let that slide. "The persons poisoned this place and no one could live here anymore. Radioactivity causes all sorts of health problems for living things like persons, owls, cats and fairies. You probably shortened your lifespan by a decade or two by entering that building. On the plus side, you won't have to save for retirement. I hate this place. The persons once rode that Ferris wheel, had weddings in the park and now no one comes near here unless they want to study mutant spruce trees that grow sideways. We came after the persons had gone and this place had gone back to the wild. Azula loves this place."

"We have to find a place to set up Mistresses spa," Ludwig said urgently. "All those fairies who need their nails buffed!"

Karo landed on the limb of an old oak tree in the back yard of a church that defiantly resisted the weather and wear all these years.

"Why did you come here?" Saphira asked as she landed next to the odd little fairy.

"A long story," Karo walked toward the hole in the tree that served as home for him and his cousin Azula. "My cousin and I graduated fairy school with Opal and Pearlie. We got a prime job running a city park but the rats became unruly and Fairy HQ didn't approve of the measures we took to keep them in line. They sentenced us to run this place. The name means _Wormwood_ in Russian by the way."

"Are you going to invite us in?" Saphira said bluntly. "I seem to remember you from fairy school. You were the half elf on your mother's side? Karo is it?"

"Of course, but Fairy School had more University credit courses." Karo motioned politely. He remembered Saphira from Fairy School and she had not treated him well. "Can I offer you some tea?"

No one ever visited and so Karo and Azula kept their two bedroom hole in the oak tree in a permanent state of chaos. Saphira had to pick her way through piles of books stacked on tables and chairs hacked out of the wood of the tree. Saphira had to stifle the urge to say 'ick' when she saw a cup of mold on what passed for the living room coffee table. The house consisted of a set of rooms connected by tunnels that Karo fondly referred to as _Chernobyl's Arboretum and Subway_."

"Stuff grows weird," Karo said as he stared at the cup of mold. "He began as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. I forgot what I invited you here for."

"Tea?" Saphira said with irritation.

"If we have any," Karo pushed a pile of magazines off a couch carved in wood with ruddy brown corduroy cushions. "Have a seat."

"_If_ you have tea?" Saphira had known a bumbling green eyed, black haired elfish fairy who hated nature in fairy school but always considered him beneath her dignity and avoided talking to him. She slowly sat down on the ugly couch.

"We don't have much but we scrape by." Karo began to search the cupboards. "You should have guessed that even on a nice spring day like today you haven't landed up in one of the beautiful garden spot. Of course we don't have to worry about..."

"May I help make Mistress's tea?" Ludwig tugged on Karo's cape.

Karo pulled out a green tin box of tea bags. "I can manage this. Best before July 1985?" Karo looked into the adjacent living room. "Sapphire? Can you live without the tea?"

"Saphira." Saphira corrected Karo.

"We have tea but...was 1985 a good year for tea?" Karo drank coffee or what passed for coffee in the Ukraine which probably meant pencil shavings or Soviet Army surplus tank rust. "Can I sell you on a nice cup of coffee?" Karo heard the front door open and slam shut.

"I'm back!" The amber eyed fairy said as she marched in and looked at the sophisticated Saphira sitting on the couch. "Let me explain a few things. According to Gobsmack's letter, you tried to glue your cousin Pearlie to one of the slides in the playground of Jubilee Park so persons would see her." Azula put her hands on her hips as she stood in the entrance way of the house. Saphira had no doubt Azula would have slugged her or maimed her for such a thing and remained quiet as she sat. "Pearlie ran quite a nice park in quite a nice city. Karo and I did some of our training there some years ago during the Summer. She drove us nuts with her gentle compassion and caring nature and delusions of optimism but the folks at Fairy HQ hold her in high regard. You should have acted with a little more calculated decorum – sucking up as it were."

"Get to the point." Saphira wound her hand as if to motion Azula to make her point.

"Avatar!" Azula snapped her fingers. "The persons movie – have you seen it? About the planet Pandora and those tall blue persons. We have a copy."

"No!" Saphira began to realize Azula wasn't making a point very quickly and that Gobsmack had vastly understated the mental instability of the pair.

"Well!" Azula walked toward Saphira. "Welcome to Chernobyl. We have no blue persons but this place doesn't forgive mistakes. Don't make any and you live."

Ludwig entered the room with a tarnished coffee pot and a few things that looked like biscuits on a tarnished tray. "We made coffee."

"Either coffee or boric acid," Karo said apologetically. "The bat guy can work wonders in the kitchen. We barely have the ability to make food."

"Ew!" Saphira looked at the beaten up tableware. "You don't have silverware with less rust."

"That's boric acid dude." Karo told Ludwig as he poured out the coffee carefully into cups. "An honest mistake as all our groceries have Russian writing on them."

Azula uttered a phrase she would come to regret. "So? Do you need a place to stay?"

"The Russian fairy mob still offer that service where the cap someone for a fee?" Azula asked Karo the next morning as she sat in the kitchen at the table. "Saphira has gotten on the last of my nerves. I thought I had no social skills and I wouldn't need them in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. I like living alone."

"Why drag me along?" Karo sat across the table from Azula pushed his glasses up his nose.

"I needed your help," Azula tapped the table.

"Ew!" Saphira yelled. "You have a dead squirrel on your front door. Disgusting!"

"Mistress does not like such things!" Ludwig cried out in panic.

Azula balled her hands into tight fists. "Grr!" She walked out on the branch that provided a porch for the home, kicked the squirrel off the branch and it struck the ground with a dull thump. "Wait until the dead tabby cat season begins."

"You have lots of dead animals?" Ludwig asked.

Azula shrugged. "They require much less care."

Ludwig looked down at the squirrel and found himself struck by a sudden fit of decency. "Shouldn't we at least bury him?"

"I came out here for a breath of fresh air and I didn't expect to see_ that!_" Saphira moaned and did everything she could to sound disgusted. "Have you no pride in your work? Can't you try to keep this park decent?"

Azula decided to make her point subtly "Karo? Can you come out here please?"

"Another one bites the dust?" Karo walked out and looked down at the squirrel. "At least the Russian mafia has stopped dumping corpses off here."

"Karo can talk to plants." Azula patted him on the shoulder. "He's half fairy and half elf – which half is which I don't know. When you talk to our oak tree, what does it tell you?"

"It complains a good deal." Karo scratched his head. "It grew up here – of course. It hates the Germans for invading Mother Russia and has a German rifle round lodged in it. It witnessed the accident at the nuclear power plant and got a sunburn and now the water tastes funny. I quit talking to it because it's awfully depressing to be perfectly honest."

"Why do _I _care?" Saphira complained.

"I have talked to other plants." Karo continued. "I don't anymore because most of the time I only get one word in reply. Brains! Brains!"

"Ludwig!" Saphira hollered across the kitchen.

* * *

><p>One day with Saphira had convinced Azula that Gobsmack the Goblin had decided to punish her <em>not<em> Saphira. She lived in a nuclear wasteland but she had come to enjoy her work since the _Exclusion Zone_ was one of the lowest maintenance parks in the world. The radiation danger kept persons away and the animals and plants made little demands on her time.

"I can't read the Russian writing on this package." Saphira held out a silver foil package which felt like it contained rice.

Azula muttered something about sending a brick directly through Saphira's skull.

Karo came out of the washroom. "I wouldn't eat that." Karo said in his easy going manner. "You have in your hand one of the packages of food from the Russian Space Program. You can eat it – I mean in the sense you'll survive ingesting it – but you won't enjoy it."

"_You_ have to be kidding." Saphira rolled her eyes.

"No," Karo pointed at the label. "Cheese and potato perogies. They need to save weight when traveling into space and so they dehydrate the food. When you are in space, you add water or recycled urine or vodka depending on your tastes. When the reactor blew up, it contaminated all the local food but they had to feed the thousands of workers building the containment building so the best way to do that was to use space food." Karo tapped the label. "The best thing about these things – never go bad."

"I was wondering," Azula seethed as she sat on the couch. "When will you find a place for your spa?"

"Hoping to get a wing polish?" Saphira said sarcastically as she paced the living room in front of Azula. "I suppose that might be a bit girly for a fairy like you."

"Mistress!" Ludwig said excitedly. "Chocolate."

Karo looked at the package. "Not quite chocolate. Try for beef flavor bullion cubes or rat poison."

"I need a suitable and upscale site for my spa," Saphira explained to Azula as if Azula was a complete idiot. "Spa guests need to feel comfortable and need an atmosphere of class, sophistication and luxury."

Azula found this very amusing. The city next to the nuclear power plant had come off the drawing board of some vodka soaked Stalinist and was a Soviet era showpiece until the reactor blew up. Soviet minders took western reporters to see this place in order to show them how advanced Soviet society had become. Western reporters could see that Soviet Russia could do anything the west could accomplish although making a car that didn't suck evaded them. Many of the buildings had begun to fall apart and the classiest building in the town was the railway station although the roof had blown away in a winter storm.

"I can't believe the Fairy Queen punished me by sending me to this hole." Saphira wined.

Ludwig tried to console her. "But Mistress you will have a chance to prove yourself and then you can return to Jubilee Park. We'll make do."

"I rigged our crystal ball to get persons TV." Azula said rather randomly. "Actually I rigged a person's TV to get crystal ball broadcasts. Amazing what you can do with a piece of Uranium and a paper clip. We get satellite TV from all over the planet and maybe something violent in the genre of cop show might settle your mind. After a day listening to you complain I need some gratuitous violence to calm me down."

Saphira and Ludwig decided to rest after Ludwig had shifted all the magazines off a lounge chair which had an equally ugly brown fabric but which looked passably comfortable. She had_ not_ enjoyed her first day with Azula the Park Fairy and Karo the Halfbreed. She sat down and Ludwig hung off a rusted student desk lamp on one of the oak tables next to the lounger.

Azula found a Korean channel that had a cop show with plenty of violent shooting and angry mobsters.

"Can I ask why you have a dead squirrel outside your tree!" Gobsmack complained as he popped into existence on the branch outside the front door. As a goblin, he had the power of teleportation but something about high levels of radioactive isotopes in the wood of the tree or the lead lining the inside never let him teleport inside. He had to make certain Saphira had arrived and had not run off to some more pleasant place like Pakistan to set up shop. As a supervisor, he was an insufferable pratt and with his squeaky clean blonde hair and his overdressed and overly formal and irritating style of management; he had one good virtue in Azula's eyes – he seldom stayed long. He had no interest in Azula's park because persons had no interest in it, Azula made no effort to make him at all comfortable and so unless Fairy HQ wished him to take a quick peek, he stayed away.

Azula answered the door. "What about it?"

"You have to take care to keep this place presentable and look after the living things." Gobsmack lectured Azula who only pretended to listen. "Even though persons don't come here; you have all the small creatures to care for."

Azula wasted no time. "The squirrel is dead. How much more can I do for it?"

"It _looks_ seedy!" Gobsmack answered back. "I find it disgusting."

"Karo!" Azula yelled. "Tell Gobsmack what happens if we dig holes in the ground."

Karo answered between bites of his dinner which consisted of a toasted muffin. He stood on the branch with Gobsmack and looked down at the squirrel. "You want me to dig a hole? I'm not that stupid. The_ Exclusion Zone _doesn't have one of those toll free Call Before You Dig numbers and things under the ground can wind up killing you. Old World War II shells can pulp you to mush. Soviet persons buried the nastier bits of nuclear waste in shallow pits to hide their mistakes – so they told no one where these lie. I've seen fumes rising out of cracks in empty fields that have dropped birds in mid air. The soil has its own hazards which include long lived radioactive poisons and the burly groundhogs who make it a policy to beat you up and drop your unconscious body on the edge of town if you infringe on their territory if you're lucky. They've been known to skin you and make you into cushions."

Gobsmack looked at Karo. "I see." He pointed at Karo. "Do you know that it is your job to properly care for the animals here and that means..."

A fox sniffed the air as it prowled the tall grass beneath the oak tree. Karo saw a flash of red as the fox dashed to the squirrel and dashed away with it.

"Things like that sort of take care of themselves," Karo told Gobsmack in a matter of fact way. "I see." Gobsmack said less enthusiastically.

"After a few close calls, we have learned to avoid spending time on the ground." Karo told Gobsmack. "Can I offer you something to drink?"

"Gobsmack!" Saphira yelled in a shrill voice that made Azula jump. "How come I have to spend time with that half breed and this drill sergeant of a fairy!"

Gobsmack ducked into the house in the tree with his hands behind his back. "Fairy HQ has made its verdict. I worked for a more lenient sentence but the Fairy Queen would not hear it."

"Saphira? Please stop calling me a half breed." Karo added as he followed behind the goblin.

"Azula! We have some issues to go over!" Gobsmack shouted. "I saw the ghastliest thing when I saw a dead squirrel outside your tree." He stood in front of Azula who kept trying to watch person's television, gave up and shut the set off. "I saw something ghastly – a fox came and made off with his poor body."

"A little to late to quiz me on this don't you think?" Azula sat back with her feet on the coffee table. She had less to fear from fairy inspector Gobsmack than most fairies. She lived in the worst possible 'park' on the planet so he could hardly make her life more miserable or give her a worse assignment unless the persons had a park on the surface of Venus. "Anyway it was what ol' Squirrelly wanted."

"May I remind you of Fairy Regulation Number 405!" Gobsmack tapped his fingers and Saphira drank this all in as she enjoyed watching Azula catch trouble. Saphira had not yet learned Gobsmack made more bluster than real trouble for Azula. He could rant, threaten, write her up and report her but he knew even Fairy HQ would rather ignore this place than put some meaningful effort into turning it into a real park. Gobsmack had enough trouble in his unhappy goblin life than to make a real enemy out of Azula. Azula scared him.

Azula scratched her head. "A park fairy must never...? Come on help me here."

"_All_ unexplained deaths of animals in_ your _park must be investigated." Gobsmack said emphatically. "_All of them!_"

"_All_ deaths in my park are unnatural." Azula looked at Karo who had stood at the door remaining quiet. "Radiation induced cancers top the list. Kalashnikov rounds place second in the list; but we have had building collapses and the odd suicide. You've given me a job with a future."

"I expect you to have a report on the death of that squirrel prepared when I return _next week_." Gobsmack pushed past Karo and stood outside on the branch and in a wink and a pop he vanished.

"Tsk. Tsk Tsk. He sounds very unhappy with you dear Azula." Saphira smirked as Ludwig smiled gleefully.

Azula switched the television back on. "You have that kind of dark, spiderweb goth blue dress. You investigate the death of that squirrel."

"Me!" Saphira clutched her chest.

"Use Karo if you want." Azula smirked back. "If that idiot Gobsmack wants to know why a squirrel croaked and you want to curry favor with him then think of it as a means to please him."

"This is _your_ park!" Saphira fluttered her wings in protest.

"_You_ want to suck up to Gobsmack." Azula replied caustically. "I have done this dance with Gobsmack before. He knows no other fairies with come to the _Exclusion Zone_ willingly so even if I don't do it, he will rant and rave and yell. He will tell me that I have become a grave embarrassment and so on. On the other hand I could lie and make up some plausible story but I making him blow his top entertains me and costs nothing."

* * *

><p>The next morning found Karo searching a squirrel's nest with Saphira and Ludwig standing to outside issuing commands. This squirrel had lived a quiet life in the oak tree next to the one where Azula and Karo lived but Karo had never met him – of course all squirrels looked alike to him. The squirrel lived in a hole in a tree and Karo imagined he lived alone as the hole had one room, a ratty old pile of leaves as a bed, a pile of nuts and a desk roughly made out of soggy wood but not much else. Only a yellowing portrait of Stalin and a sheet of letter size white paper sat on the desk and peered out over the room.<p>

"When will you two find a place to live?" Karo asked as he sorted through a pile of papers in the squirrel's desk. "I have to sleep on that couch and last night when I went to the bathroom, Ludwig scared the crap out of me because I found him hanging upside down on the shower rail asleep. He has these creepy, glow in the dark eyes."

Ludwig hung from a nearby branch as close to Saphira as possible and said nothing. He had felt fearful and depressed and worried about just how a bat would fit into the wild ecology here.

"This place smells like squirrel," Saphira complained.

"Lucky it doesn't smell like cat." Karo held up the sole piece of paper he could find in the place. "Dear Comrade Beria. That's an unfortunate name." Karo pointed at the top of the letter. "What do you make of this?"

"We can't read Russian." Saphira informed Karo.

"That explains why Ludwig ate a cake of soap for breakfast." Karo shrugged and read the letter. "We expect you to carry out your duties as a loyal member of the party."

"What duty?" Saphira tapped her blue boots uncomfortably. She felt open and in spite of the warm summer sun, she felt cold.

"That's all the letter said." Karo fluttered his wings. "A dead squirrel with a duty? Did you know squirrels lived such a squalid existence?"

"Had no clue." Saphira said drearily as she checked her long black hair with her hands. "I do not associate with riff raff."

Karo held up a black and white photograph of a mustached man. "Say hello to our friend Comrade Josef Stalin."

"A person?" Saphira checked her nails.

"A rather evil one if I dare say so." Karo placed the picture back on the desk and the soggy cardboard at the back fell out and a small red notebook plopped onto the desk. "He ruled Russia way before my time. My cousin Azula got sent here by fairy HQ because she followed some of his methods although she never practiced communism." The notebook looked far newer than the picture and Karo began to look through it.

"Do tell." Saphira sounded utterly bored.

"It began with the rats in a park in a town – well that hardly matters." Karo explained as he looked at notes in pencil written in neat handwriting. The notes quoted texts by Karl Marx or Lenin that Karo had never heard of but Karo thought they looked like the rough draft of a public address. "The city had a rat problem and so did the park. My cousin decided to take stern measures against the more boisterous rats by setting up prisons and devising punishments. Fairy HQ frowned on this as water boarding a rat not only gives you a drowned rat but they consider it completely unbecoming conduct for a fairy." Karo found a small red notebook and began to examine it. "They sent her here as punishment for torturing rats."

"What brought _you_ to this dump?"

"I helped her." Karo said simply. "She found a way to impose order in an unruly park. You know that life treats us unfairly. You whip one rat with a leather strap and the Elf High Council forces you to leave your home and into exile."

"Are we through here?" Saphira complained bitterly. "This place gives me the creeps."

"Zdanov?" Karo flipped through the notebook and found the name penciled at the tope of an empty page. "What about Zdanov."

"Another Russian word?" Saphira had her arms crossed and tapped her foot impatiently.

"Zdanov the Cat lives in Pripyat." Karo took the book with him and Saphira followed him out of the dank squirrel nest. Ludwig flew overhead and circled as Karo stopped and took a breath of the fresh morning air or what passed for it. "Big gray tabby cat with sharp claws and large teeth."

Saphira looked down at the tall and unkept grass. "Would this Zadanov or whatever fellow kill a squirrel?"

"Quite possibly," Karo played with his gold hairpin. "Zdanov does what most of us do in the _Exclusion Zone_ – engage in criminal activities. He's the local black marketeer or fence or thief. When you need things, he gets them and you pay him what he wants. He's no communist but he's made money working on their behalf."

"We can't visit a cat! A cat would eat me." Ludwig complained. "They would eat the Mistress too."

"He won't eat me because I've been a good customer." Karo told Ludwig as he began to fly out over the church roof. "I'll vouch for Saphira but you should go back home because he may eat you or just kill you. It depends on whether he's had a good night's sleep."

Saphira flew beside Karo and voiced her disgust. "How can you have anything to do with a gangster?"

"You come from a city park and have lawns and plants and trees without cancer." Karo fluttered over a deserted football pitch next to a high school. "The person's left this place to rot and we don't have much so we do what it takes to survive. Do you remember what I said about Zdanov?"

* * *

><p>Saphira wanted to say 'ew' as she flew over a half collapsed school with heaps of paper, books, debris and broken lumber spilling out the doors. "What about it?"<p>

"Be quiet." Karo began to descend down to a still intact cinder block tool shed near the back of the school. "Cats don't like our kind. Zdanov won't eat us. Anything else would be conjecture."

The cider block tool shed had a wide metal door that used to slide open and closed but now simply had rusted through on the bottom. Flakes of toothpaste green paint had spilled onto the cracked asphalt of the backyard of the school Saphira looked around and realized 'fixer upper' didn't do this place any kind of justice. Even in the sunshine of a summer day, the city was undeniably depressing, isolated and dirty.

"What brings Azula's helper and his new girlfriend to my house?" A voice spoke in a refined British accent as a huge, gray tabby cat walked through the hole, tail held up high and circled Saphira who turned deathly pale and Karo who kept looking at the red notebook he had found in the squirrel den.

"_I'm_ not _his_ girlfriend," Saphira objected. "My name is Saphira!"

The gray tabby cat circled again and purred then his ginger eyes looked at Saphira. He had a dirty red collar with a dirty brass bell that no longer made any sound."You fairy folk wind up here because you did something bad. Azula and her cousin Karo tortured rats which to me seemed like a waste of a good meal but that's me. Lots of us have wound up here because we did something bad or in poor taste or made someone angry."

Saphira shivered and admired Karo for his calm.

"She tried to reveal the existence of another fairy to persons." Karo said. "Can I cut to the chase?" Karo held up the red notebook he had with him. "Did you know of the squirrel Beria?"

"Krasny the Fox mentioned something about having him for dinner," Zdanov said as he sat on the ground. "He told me he was a day old when he found him at the base of your tree and not very tasty. So? Azula now purging us of communists?"

"He has your name in his notebook of contacts." Karo wondered if he would have to pick up Saphira off the ground as she looked very frail. "You find things for us. Did he have anything he needed finding?"

"This is new! Azula the Park Fairy regards the only good communist as a dead communist. She never took an interest in the death of one before!" Zdanov laughed in a deep booming way. He looked at Saphira who shook in her blue boots. He pointed a claw delicately in her direction and spoke softly. Zdanov fed off of fear and enjoyed tormenting Saphira and smiled broadly with his yellow teeth when he saw Saphira stumble back. He turned back to Karo with a darker look on his face. "Beria wound up dead huh?" Zdanov laughed again. "Beria never asked me for anything. If he needed anything, he died before he had a chance to come to my shop. Why do you care about a dead communist?" Zdanov sat on all fours making himself comfortable in the sunshine.

"Azula has orders from higher up to investigate this."

"The squirrels around here have always harbored communist sympathies – young Karo – you know this so don't insult my intelligence." Zdanov made a point to scratch his claws on the old asphalt. "Order's from higher up will get all you fairies killed: you know the score with the communists. Squirrels fall out of favor or say politically incorrect or don't clap during speeches at the proper time. They _do not_ like meddlers or outsiders."

"I have some napping and some other work to do." Zdanov said pleasantly enough and then his voice became darker as if he were uttering an order. He crawled through the rusted hole of his house. "I bid you farewell and luck in your inquiry."

Saphira and Karo flew off but Saphira had to rest on the edge of the roof of the old school. "What did the cat mean by that?"

"Party purges." Karo sat beside her. "The Squirrel Communist Party has a tradition of – well – ridding itself of undesired members. It's all very unseemly but if the rest of us stay out of it – we're safe. If we dig into their affairs we could wind up dead."

* * *

><p>"Another purge?" Azula stood in the living room and tapped her feet as Karo and Saphira rested their wings on the couch. "What would Pearlie do?"<p>

"She would get them all talking about their differences." Ludwig hung on the student lamp. "She always settles these things peacefully."

Saphira glared at him as she drew a red towel around her as she felt badly shaken after visiting with a huge cat.

"Right." Azula snapped her fingers. "I had taken the opposite approach. The squirrels living here are radical communists but they quibble about the details so they fight among each other. I had no problem with this because for the price of the odd dead squirrel; as long as they fought among themselves they didn't pester me or anyone else. Those who meddle in the affairs of squirrels usually vanish after a time."

"Fairy HQ would never approve!" Saphira tightened the towel around her shoulders.

"Hence my problem." Azula said. "The squirrels consider park fairies or elves or goblins as the Bourgeoisie and the great oppressors of their kind. They all hate us but as long as I kept them fighting and killing each other off, they had no time to try and stage a revolution to get rid of everyone else. If they drive us off, then they would rid themselves of all the other animals living in the _Exclusion Zone_ and turn this park into a communist state. If Gobsmack or Fairy HQ begin poking around, they could upset the delicate balance of power I tried so hard to set up. Those stupid idealistic elders have no idea of the hard realities of running this place."

Karo looked at the notebook again. "Zdanov sells to both sides and yet he said he had no dealings with Beria the Squirrel. He hides a great many things from prying eyes but I doubt if he'd lie about this."

Azula had a thoughtful look on his face. "I don't think he did. Like everyone living here, Zdanov keeps his affairs very private and you had Saphira with you and so he had no desire to spill his guts."

"Why not banish Zdanov?" Ludwig protested. "He sounds evil."

"We need him," Azula snapped. "Zdanov gets us things. If I start banishing everyone in this park who did questionable things to get by; we'd have no park to speak of."

"Did you torture those poor rats?" Saphira asked sarcastically.

Azula stepped up to the delicate looking fairy. "Fairy HQ in no way approves of torture! The fairy elders wants us to deal with all of the creatures living in the park with compassion and fairness." Azula glared at Saphira who shrank back. "I may not share these beliefs."

Saphira turned white.

* * *

><p>"A cat nearly eats us this morning and now you want to speak with this <em>Trotsky the Squirrel<em>?" Saphira flew close to Karo as he flew between the trees. "I used to rely on Ludwig to fly me around the park and all this flying is taking a toll on my hair." It had not escaped her notice that all of the city of Pripyat had a slimy coating of dark greasy graphite over it. Even the leaves on the trees had a coating and she began to find herself feeling greasy. She could not fathom how Karo could accept all of this. Elves loved trees and hated environmental abuse but Karo dismissed the stunted trees and pervasive grime as part of life.

"I don't want to speak to Trotsky but I have no choice. I think Ludwig should remain out of sight – we have a large number of very big cats and an equal number of big hawks." Karo landed on the broad branch of a red maple tree. "I dislike squirrels as a matter of principle but Trotsky knows the Communists. He used to head the party but was expelled after the squirrels held their last Party meeting. They chose a squirrel named Tupolev over him as the glorious leader but he still knows everything that goes on inside it. He may not wish to talk to us but I can threaten to have Azula beat him savagely."

Saphira fluttered her wings nervously. "Has Azula ever beaten a squirrel savagely?"

"Hush!" Karo knocked on a small round door at the crotch of the branch of the tree. The door made a creaking sound and Karo smelled the dank smell of death.

"Ew!" Saphira held her mouth.

Trotsky the Squirrel had once enjoyed planned economies, five year plans, acorns, twitching his little, dark brown nose in the fresh spring air and plotting. Karo walked into Trotsky's small little flat and found the furry brown squirrel with a small ax in his back.

"How did he die?" Saphira screamed.

Karo opened the door fully so Saphira could see inside the dark squirrel's home. "Ax in the back – usually does the trick." Karo said in a non committal manner and began examining papers on the Trotsky's desk. "Come in and tell me what you see that strikes you as odd?"

Saphira vomited off the branch of the tree.

"Not quite what I noticed but we can work with that," Karo began carefully searching the small hole in the tree half expecting an ax wielding murderer to jump out of a dark recess in the room but Trotsky had died at least a day ago so he had little to worry about. "_No signs of a struggle_ would have earned you more points in our quiz."

"You have two dead squirrels!" Gobsmack spoke from outside the small squirrel hole and Karo and Saphira jumped back. "We don't let those kind of things happen." Gobsmack stood next to Karo. "What do you have to say for yourself Karo!"

"You have some of that yellow police tape?"

Gobsmack shook his head. "Azula sent you here to find out why you had one murder in your park, now you have two!" Gobsmack could hear Karo rooting through papers.

"This is necessary for the Revolution?" Karo came out of the small wooden door holding a bunch of papers. "What would most of us do if someone came at us with an ax? You don't have to answer that Gobsmack. Saphira needs you to hold her up so she won't faint. You would struggle, scream and make a mess. Trotsky didn't put up a fight; not even a piece of paper or a pen is out of place and he wrote _'This is necessary for the Revolution'_ as the last entry in his diary." Karo held up a small, hardcover blue book.


	2. Chapter 2

**Pearlie the Park Fairy**

**Saphira's New Assignment – Chapter 2**

Ludwig kept himself amused by cleaning Azula and Karo's tree-house. He had sorted all of the magazines and stored them neatly away in boxes in closets. He could not imagine some of the things he witnessed in the cleaning. Issues of _Wand and Wing_ and_ The Morning Myth _ from ten years ago mixed in with magazines with Cyrillic Letters on their covers. Someone (possibly Azula) had translated the operating procedures manual for the Chernobyl type reactor from Russian into Fairy. He could read the Fairy version but that proved of little use for a bat who had failed high school physics. He had plenty of time as Saphira and Karo had gone out to see some squirrel named Trotsky and Azula the Park Fairy had gone out to run errands, told him nothing about them but warned the little bat in no uncertain terms not to leave or risk becoming part of the food chain. He didn't mind since he enjoyed cleaning and cooking and making people happy.

Azula bumbled through the front door and slammed it shut.

"A good compromise leaves everyone body pissed off." She held the door shut. "Two clans of wild bees wanted the same field of dandelions and wildflowers but one of them insisted they had the stronger claim. They asked me to settle the dispute and so I suggested that they split the field in half with one hive taking the south side and one hive taking the north half. They agreed to sting me to death for making such a stupid and idiotic suggestion!"

She heard loud thumps at the doors as the angry bees stung the door in an attempt to get inside.

"Did I stumble into the wrong bloody place!" Azula said with a higher degree of concern. She fluttered her wings quickly which Ludwig didn't know was her way of showing anger.

Ludwig landed at Azula's feet. "I did some cleaning?" He spoke politely and apologetically. "You are pleased, yes?"

"I'm pleased, no?"Azula had not enjoyed her day and picked Ludwig off the ground by his collar. "This will mean three months of no one actually being able to find anything. Our house relies on a delicate balance of filth, squalor and entropy." She put Ludwig abruptly down on the ground and looked at the living room. "Holy crap! How did you accomplish so much cleaning in such a short time? I can see the floor! Did you clean the kitchen as well! If this place gets any cleaner, it'll start looking like the set for a Chekhov play."

"I did want to help Ma'am?" Something in Azula's mannerisms suggested to Ludwig that a more military form of address would help him speak with her. He expected physical abuse, cutting insults and yet despite the yelling, Azula didn't conduct unfair character attacks on his intelligence or competence. "With you and Karo and Mistress trying to solve these awful murders..."

"I admire your desire to do something helpful." Azula said coldly but in a half complimentary manner. "Once you leave we won't find anything seems beside the point. Shouldn't you spend your time flying around, eating mosquitoes and doing what makes bats happy rather than work as a lacky for that idiot of a goth barbie doll fairy? This would keep our house nicely unkempt and might offer you a chance to do what bats do for self exploration."

"I enjoy serving my Mistress." Ludwig answered quietly as he stood at Azula's feet.

Azula hated sycophants. "I have no idea if you could do so much more. Bats fall out of my area of expertise." She looked around the clean couch and chairs and at the dust free tables and clean floor. What happened to the copy of _Crime and Punishment_ sitting on the coffee table?"

Oh? That big black book?" Ludwig fluttered around Azula's head. "I put it away?"

Azula nodded.

"I put all the big books in Karo's closet." Ludwig stood on the coffee table and stared up at Azula waiting for approval.

"I had plans on reading that," Azula shrugged. "I heard it was about some Russians."

Saphira ran through the front door and hid behind Azula with a swiftness born out of self preservation. Karo and Gobsmack walked in quickly through the front door like they were evading gunfire.

"The bees have a bee in their bonnet," Karo shut the door quickly. "Gobsmack tried to reason with them which only proved he's an idiot. For one thing, they're _Russian_ bees so shouting at them in Fairy will do nothing but make them angry. For the other thing, they usually settle their own affairs – one queen bee kills the other and both hives come to an agreement to join and take on the other hive three fields over." Karo turned to Gobsmack and poked him in the chest with the point of his wand – a simple green stick with a green sphere, "you owe me big."

"The bees didn't like you shooting electric bolts at them?" Azula asked calmly.

"They scattered and took off to fight other battles."

"Tell Azula what we found!" Gobsmack tapped his foot.

"Trotsky's dead," Karo told Azula. "Someone buried an ax in his back. He wrote – and I quote: _'This is necessary for the Revolution.'_ No sign of a struggle and he couldn't have killed himself given the angle of the ax in his back. We have no idea how Beria died but he had notes that looked like he had a public speech planned. Trotsky had an ax in his back and I couldn't find any signs of a struggle in either case. We could have a mass murderer who cleans up after himself; it wouldn't be our first but something tells me something else."

"You two incompetents!" Gobsmack scolded. "You need the help of a professional, competent park fairy who can truly get to the bottom of things!"

Azula pushed Saphira out from behind her. "You sent us Saphira. She's been about as much help as a first aid kit in a funeral home." Azula decided to school Gobsmack on some simple facts of life in the Zone. "The freaking squirrels have begun another one of their purges and if we let it run its course then no one else will get hurt. If we interfere, they might not like it and then – well they have a gift for gruesome punishments._ Exhibit A_ – a dead squirrel at the base of our tree. _Exhibit B_ - one with an ax in his spine."

"None the less!" Gobsmack wagged his finger to scold Azula. "I will make arrangements to have Pearlie come here and straighten your park out."

Gobsmack harrumphed and then left by the front door. "I want this mystery solved!" He cried out. A soft pop followed this complaint as Gobsmack left.

"Saphira?" Azula asked quietly. "Do you think Pearlie could survive being thrown into a concrete mixer? The squirrels have been known to do that to meddlers."

* * *

><p>"<em>La La La Do Di Do<em>."

Azula hid behind the tall red and white steam chimney of the old reactor complex as persons in radiation protection gear walked out along the ridge of the dark, rusting roof of the sarcophagus. Persons came from time to time and took samples, inspected the Sarcophagus, placed instruments and left. Today they took advantage of the Ukrainian summer sun to take careful measurements of the background radiation in case it had increased. Azula heard the singing and cursed the fact that her frame would not permit her to use an AK 47.

"Hello." A daintier fairy than Saphira with long overly blonde hair waved kindly at Azula. "What are those persons doing?" She asked Azula as she hovered next to her.

"Measuring the amount of plutonium in the dust." Azula looked at the fairy hovering next to her. She wore a pink shirt, blue jeans and high healed boots. The string of perfect pearls in her hair gave her identity away. "_Pearlie the Park Fairy,_ I presume?" Azula said coldly. "Welcome to the _Chernobyl Exclusion Zone_. Have you a Last Will and Testament? Gobsmack must have briefed you on this place and the recent trouble we've had."

"He told me ghastly things." Pearlie said in a scared voice. "Oh! The awful things persons have done to this place. He told me all about the terrible squirrel murders."

"Dead squirrels," Azula stated in a matter of fact way. "Had he not kept meddling, I really wouldn't have cared. The squirrels can poison, knife and ax each other in the back in the name of _Purifying the Revolution_ and I couldn't care less. Not as if we lost a fortune."

Pearlie had the same look on her face as a shell – shocked soldier. Her wings continued to flutter but her freckled face looked very pale.

"It only took you two days to get here." Azula had hoped Gobsmack would not have a sense of urgency about the two squirrel murders but given the quick arrival of Pearlie, Gobsmack intended to get to the bottom of these matters. "Gobsmack tell you that you had to come here urgently?"

"Yes." Pearlie said sadly.

"Thing is," Azula motioned for Pearlie to follow her as she steered a careful course away from the chimney carefully plotted to avoid having the persons take notice of her, "thing is he has put all of us in danger. Some mysteries are best left unexplored. I've spent long enough here to know that most of our creatures prefer that we fairies stay out of their way."

* * *

><p>When Azula and Pearlie returned, she found him sitting outside of the tree-house and tapping his feet. Azula had warned him that his red velvet robe and flamboyant clothing did make him a target for cats but Gobsmack had not heeded her advise nor did he realize that the Zone did have a different set of rules. Azula had not expected to see Gobsmack so soon and didn't hide her frustration.<p>

"What now!" She shouted in frustration as she landed with Pearlie on the branch. "Ludwig turn up in one of the abandoned blocks of flats burned to a crisp?"

"He won't open the door when I knock!" Gobsmack made it sound like everything that happened in the Zone was Azula's fault.

"He thinks you are offering religious literature - no?"

"Can you reason with him Pearlie?"

"Ludwig?" Pearlie said sweetly. "You can open the door! It's me Pearlie, Azula and Gobsmack."

Karo opened the door cautiously while rubbing his head. Ludwig poked his head from behind Karo and looked very scared. "Your knocking brought me out of unconsciousness."

"What happened!" Pearlie put her arm around Karo.

Karo pointed up at Pearlie. "Who's this?" He asked with a hint of impatience.

"I'm Pearlie. Fairy HQ asked me to help you solve this horrible mystery." Pearlie patted Karo on the shoulder. "What happened to you?"

"We have three fairies and a bat sharing one bathroom and so it takes me some time to get ready for the day I was having my shower – _with cold water _I might add." Karo began slowly. "Azula left first to work on some unfinished park business and meet the new Queen Bee. Once she left, a gang of six squirrels kicked open the door and Saphira hid somewhere. They said nothing and beat Ludwig and me over the head with a hard cover copy of Das Kapital by a C. Marx."

"Oh you poor thing." Pearlie helped Karo inside the house.

Azula stared at the mess left behind by the thugs. Ludwig looked badly shaken but unhurt which could not be said for the house which had been sacked.

"Saphira?" Pearlie shouted. "Cousin?"

Saphira uncurled from fetal position from her hiding place in Azula's closet behind a pile of boxes and a large persons pistol.

_Clang!_

"Pearlie!" Saphira brushed herself off. "We have to leave! I can't stay here. Gobsmack! Have you got a prison to keep me?"

Pearlie and Gobsmack rushed to the sound of her voice.

Azula followed calmly behind them leaving Karo and Ludwig in the living room.

Karo felt the large bump on the back of his head as he looked at the bat. "Nice example for all the kids out there!"

"What could I do?" Ludwig spoke in a shaking voice.

"Not in the face! Not in the face!" Karo flopped down onto the couch. "Six squirrels beat me over the head with copies of Das Kapital while you screamed. Thanks pal! What about teaching courage and bravery when you see the park fairy getting the crap beaten out of him by a six pack of squirrels with heavy books? Nature abhors courage."

"What could I have done!"

"Get in their hair? Bite them!"

Pearlie helped Saphira remain standing as they walked into the living room.

"She can't handle it here," Azula told Gobsmack as he followed her out. She didn't say this out of compassion but because she knew that weakness was a liability and she had no desire to die because Saphira lost her nerve. "Fairies who can't handle the Zone shouldn't be here. Nothing wrong with that but this place makes demands on your spirit only some can handle."

"People!" Gobsmack held up his hand.

Karo held his head. "I have someone trying to hammer a nail into the back of my head – tone it down you red caped fashion victim."

"Fairy HQ sent her here," Gobsmack's voice lost its commanding tone, "and she will have to stay for now."

"Cousin?" Saphira asked while she straightened out her blue cobweb themed skirt. "These two fairies are an insult to fairies everywhere."

"People!" Gobsmack raised his hand. "Fairy HQ wants this mystery solved and wants all of you to bring peace and security to this park."

Azula made an obscene gesture with her finger. "You want to know what I think of Fairy HQ! I've had it with your pompous attitude." Gobsmack began to retreat out the door.

"Guys!" Pearlie pleaded and grabbed Azula by the waist because Azula as even Pearlie knew, was not beyond punching people in the face if she felt they deserved it. "We have a job to do! If we work together we can do this."

* * *

><p>"Would you really have hit Gobsmack in the face if I didn't stop you?" Pearlie asked Azula as they flew together over the pine forests of the Zone.<p>

"I had every intent to punch him in the head."

"I only want what's best for you."

"If you wanted the best for me, you'd have let me bash Gobsmack in the face."

"I want the best for this park and everyone living here." Pearlie smiled in her soothing manner.

"A twenty megaton nuclear test would do the trick."

"Alexander lives in that small group of fir trees." Azula pointed ahead. He fled here to escape the oppressive Communist Party and he doesn't like strangers." Azula grabbed Pearlie's arm and dove for the ground.

"What?" Pearlie tried to tear herself free but Azula had a strong grip.

"He has crows for guards." Azula leveled out just above the rough fresh smelling grass beneath the canopy of trees. She came to a stop and stood still. "Alexander!" Azula called out. "Azula the Park Fairy here to -uh – try her best not to look like a meddling trespasser?"

"We have some – uh - daisy counting." Pearlie tore her arm free from Azula's grip. She could hear the crows in the trees cackling at their expense.

"We came to warn you of another purge?" Azula shouted out. "Daisy counting? When we do get killed do you want them to _actually_ find our corpses? I admire the fact you've gotten into the spirit of this place by lying but please leave the professional lying to me." She whispered to Pearlie in grave annoyance. "Alexander knows me and would never buy into that."

"Another purge – hardly comes as a shock." A deep but old sounding voice seemed to come out of all directions as if the trees has some kind of home theater system. "Oh? Azula and another fairy? What did the fairy with the green eyes and pearls do to find herself in this place? Murder a rat? You know all the animals fear Azula because she drowned many a rat in her stint as a city park fairy. I know her cousin Karo helped her carry out those crimes so I'm eager to find out what you did."

"I came to solve the murder of two squirrels." Pearlie said confidently. "Fairy HQ sent me to help bring justice to the murderer."

A pause followed. "Do you speak Russian? My Fairy is a bit weak."

"My Russian is even weaker." Pearlie held close to Azula. "How do you know that's Alexander?" Pearlie whispered to Azula.

Azula smirked. "I know that voice."

"When I spoke out about the grave crimes of the Communist Party in this park, Azula the Park Fairy did nothing to help us! I had to flee here before the secret police captured me and made me vanish." The voice boomed as if the amplifier had gone up one or two notches. "Why does Azula the Park Fairy care about the death of two squirrels? She prefers to let them fight among each other, squabbling over five year plans, over interpretations of Marxism and visions of political purity. Azula the Park Fairy encourages the squirrels to fight, squabble and kill each other. Ask her what she did during the last purge when the secret police drowned thirty of our kind in the Pripyat river?"

"I smuggled your writings out to other parks where they were published. I protected your anonymity" Azula shouted back up into the trees.

The voice remained unnervingly silent.

As Pealie watched Azula talking to the disembodied voice of Alexander, she had memories of her from her days at Fairy School. Even as a young fairy, Azula had shown a tendency toward free thinking, independence and had a distinctly anti social nature. Pearlie didn't believe Azula ever harbored true evil but she was had a darker side to her than other fairies. Saphira schemed and manipulated those around out of a deep sense of inferiority and jealousy. Pearlie could understand this and had forgiven her cousin many times for her misdeeds. As for Azula, her darkness came out of a lack of emotion which made her hard to relate to. Azula had tortured rats to achieve order in her park. She had not chosen to banish miscreants as other fairies did, but had coldly punished them. The fairies had sentenced her to spend untold years in this place until she reformed but Azula never admitted remorse or backed down from her belief she had done the right thing. Pearlie sensed Azula's inner strength. She was a beautiful fairy and she took pride in her appearances but not the same pride Pearlie or Opal did, Azula looked like a neat and severe military commander who wore her uniform with pride and perfect order.

Pearlie listened to the silence of the forest. "What do we do if his crows attack us?"

We fly like hell."

"Crows fly faster than fairies." Pearlie whispered back.

"I can fly faster than you."

"Ah Azula, some of the party have fallen out of favor. I knew of this squirrel who attended last years Party Congress. Beria gave a speech of some length and at the end the audience leaped to its feet and applauded. He grew tired after a quarter of an hour of applause and so he quietly stopped clapping. Someone in the secret police noted this. The next morning this squirrel vanished. Do you know the lesson you should take from this?" The deep voice asked the two small fairies. "When you attend the Party Congress speaches, don't be the first one to stop clapping."

"Beria died and got eaten by a fox." Azula yelled up at the canopy of the fir trees. "We have no idea how he died. He had no obvious wounds."

"Uh huh," Alexander snickered, "and Trotsky had a very bad accident with an ax. As a reward for loyalty, old party warhorses like Trotsky typically fall into prison - a reward for long service. The Party doesn't murder the old guard: you have the sequence of events wrong. Trotsky killed the ambitious upstart Beria to make room for himself as head of the secret police – a title given some dignity with the title Minister of Public Safety. Someone killed Trotsky for such betrayal perhaps under instructions from Tupolev. What fox ate Beria?"

"Krasny?" Azula shouted out. "I never met him myself but Zdanov knows him. Why? Foxes are family loving folk and have nothing to do with squirrels. He only wanted a square meal." Azula liked the foxes for they did have a tight but peaceful community that caused little trouble. Foxes liked their families, liked their clans and enjoyed hunting in the forests of the exclusion zone. She found them friendly and had no trouble keeping on good terms with them.

A silence returned and Pearlie shivered in spite of the high early afternoon sun.

"He's dead." The voice boomed. "Trotsky poisoned Beria in hopes no one would notice. Trotsky killed his opponents with poisons – he disliked the hard work of choking or strangling them. The Zone has some of the best poisons a rabid Communist could ever want and Trotsky was an avid poisoner. Beria dies of some kind of poison, the fox brings the squirrel home for his family, and they die when they dine."

"This does change things," Azula said.

"Indeed – the squirrels have taken innocent lives." Alexander sounded dour and unhappy. "How will you two deal with this now?"

Pearlie pulled at Azula's shoulder. "Can we leave now."

"I bid you farewell Alexander." Azula spoke in an oddly respectful tone. "Thank you."

"Farewell young fairies." The voice cut out and the sounds of frogs and birds in the forest returned. The crows flew off as if given silent instructions and gave both fairies a chance to leave safely.

* * *

><p>Karo had the television set to a Russian game show and jacked the volume to full hoping to silence Saphira. They had the help of Zdanov the Cat to acquire a small LCD TV and satellite television receiver but the set up took up half the living room wall and partly blocked the entrance to the kitchen. As magical beings, Karo and Azula had managed to squeeze the thing into the house but it dominated the room.<p>

"Perfect pretty Pearlie had to come to save your sorry hides," Saphira spoke sarcastically and made grand gesticulations to illustrate her point.

Karo found an even louder American Talk Show on the dial. This didn't silence Saphira but blotted out Ludwig's cheerful singing as he cleaned out the toilet.

"Are _you_ ignoring me?" Saphira said.

Karo put his head in his hands. "Is_ it _that obvious?" He muted the sound.

"Why didn't they take us along?" Saphira sat down on the recliner she had claimed as hers.

"I have a bruise the size of the large print version of Das Kapital; and you are pretty much useless. Ludvig – er – wig is a house bat and can't cope with the grave hazards of this place but he had done one heck of a job cleaning this place." Karo placed the remote next to him. "I haven't been able to find stuff in the kitchen since he cleaned out all our Soviet space food."

Saphira tapped her wand against the palm of her hand. "I can hold my own! I can help! Why should my cousin always get all the glory?"

"Alexander doesn't like strangers," Karo stood up to fetch coffee. "No one will get glory for any of this. Do you want coffee?"

"No thanks. I have no way of telling what I'm drinking." She moaned.

"Part of the excitement." Karo sneered. "Coffee or Cadmium? Both begin with the Russian letter K."

A knock came at the door and Karo placed the tray on the coffee table as if to invite or encourage Saphira to help herself. He opened the front door a crack.

"Zdanov!" Karo stood back waving his wand in front of him. "How did you get up here? Oh wait, you can climb trees." Karo caught a glimpse of Saphira hiding behind the recliner.

"Krasny the Fox and his entire family is dead," Zdanov said without any emotion. "He ate a bad squirrel."

"That implies good ones exist." Karo sounded distant and sad. Karo tried to wrap his mind around that. Foxes had a decent nature and loved their family and Karo had often help them find comfortable homes for the winter. He hadn't met Krasny – foxes often moved into the _Exclusion Zone_ to flee persons activity in their native homelands but he got on well with the other foxes that lived there.

"You remember Beria?" Zdanov asked.

"Not at all fondly."

"Someone poisoned him."

"How do you know that?"

"I'm a cat," Zdanov growled. "I know poisoning when I see it. Krasny took our friend Beria home for a feast with his family and they all died. Some of the other animals seem to think you park fairies can't do anything about the squirrels. Some have even suggested _you fairies_ side with the squirrels."

"I'll take a look." Karo said with resignation. "Where did this family live?"

Zdanov pointed his paw. "At the bottom of the field on the edge of town that used to belong to the horse ranch. They lived in a den hidden under the remains of the old horse barn." Zdanov spoke with his characteristic sternness and his ginger eyes burned with indignation and anger. Murder was bad for business. Zdanov turned his back and jumped down the tree as Karo watched him run off in the tall grass. For a fat cat, Zdanov could move.

"Come on Saphira!" Karo straightened out his collar. "We have work to do."

* * *

><p>Azula kept checking behind her for crows as she flew the long distance back to home.<p>

Pearlie flew beside her and looked at the countryside below her. She had expected the countryside to have been blighted much more severely than it looked from above. The dark green pine trees mixed with healthy stands of the leafy lighter green oak and elm trees. As she flew over the countryside, she saw abandoned Russian farmhouses falling into disrepair with their abandoned fields overgrown with tall rye grass and flowering weeds, sunflowers and wild mustard. Quail ran in quiet little ranks among the clearings while birds called out as they did in Jubilee Park. The blighted country had a beauty to it although the hands of persons had not only blighted it in the disaster but in thousands or millions of little ways. Roads decayed in the summer heat followed by their rows of drunken looking wooden power poles. Marigolds and petunias had escaped family gardens and gone wild. Tomato plants had escaped the garden and made a living among other weeds.

Azula turned to Pearlie. "Can you handle this?"

"I don't know," Pearlie wore a look of sadness, "a family has died."

"You don't have to do this." Azula turned in a gentle curve when she caught site of the old red and white steam stack of the old reactor building.

"You have no problem dealing with death."

Azula thought for a moment. "I have a problem dealing with death but I accept it because I can't do anything about it. I don't have to like it."

"Can Karo handle it?"

Azula had not expected this question.

"I had heard many things about you from other fairies but neither of you are what I expected."

"Karo probably has a better grip on reality than I do," Azula admitted. "He's half elf so he can see the bigger picture – life and death and all that. I don't know. He descended from a long line of Japanese fairies – they even have a temple to his family on Kyushu – that doesn't at all imply he can make a good car. Fairies avoid this place because of the disaster and elves avoid this place because it's a poisoned realm. Karo has accepted his sentence here."

"Where will you and Karo go once Fairy HQ sets you free?"

"Ha!" Azula laughed. "I have to stay here until those dunderheads at Fairy HQ decide I'm reformed. They think what I did besmirched the reputation of Fairyland so I may have to stay here for quite some time."

"What about Karo?"

"He has done much good work but while Fairy HQ may one day let him leave; his family won't have anything to do with him."

"Why not?" Pearlie began to feel she had begun to pry into the private lives of these two park fairies but her curiosity won out.

"We're coming to the den that belonged to Krasny," Azula began to pull into a slow glide.

Pearlie flew over a vast field of wild grass and watched a group of wild horses – dozens of brown, black, white and gray – rushing along the field as if they had decided to follow them._ The Exclusion Zone_ had a lesson for Pearlie – life endures.

The horse ranch once bred fine riding horses in demand by horsemen all around the Ukraine. The ranch dated back to the nineteenth century and the Mennonite family that ran it had lived on that land for six generations before the central planners in Moscow had decided to built their power plant and the city of Pripyat. When the accident occurred, the persons working the ranch had to leave but had so little time they didn't have any time to place their horses in trailers and take them to safety. The horses had survived and now wandered the fields of the Exclusion Zone as wild horses. The old buildings of the ranch fell victim to lack of maintenance and the weather and the large horse barn had partly collapsed into a pile of soggy, rough lumber. Karo found this sadder than the decay that had taken the city of Pripyat. The large logs of the barn and the houses showed signs of skilled craftsmanship from persons who loved what they did. After six generations as ranchers, they left in a few hours to evade the horrid poisons of the radioactive cloud that covered the land.

* * *

><p>"Can I go now?" Saphira complained as she flew over the field.<p>

Karo hovered over the field and its wild grasses. "I want to do the same thing."

Saphira and Karo landed on a dirt path near the barn and kept their ears open for any sign of trouble. Pearlie tapped Karo on the back as she landed with Azula.

"Ahh!" Karo screamed and flew up into the air.

"Sorry Karo." Pearlie blushed.

"When persons space walk, they have to wear a Maximum Absorbency Garment." Karo fluttered back down. "I need one now. Zdanov told us the fox family living here had all died of squirrel poisoning."

"We got the same news from Alexander." Azula walked toward the barn. "I hate my life."

"Don't you consider my sentence here cruel and unusual punishment?" Saphira told Pearlie as Pearlie approached to give her a hug in greeting. "Please no hugs."

Azula found the entrance to the den under a large plank of wood. "We're park fairies." She vanished into the dark hole. "Every time I say that I find it hard to sound encouraging. Pearlie and Saphira can keep an eye out for danger while Karo and I will examine the crime scene."

Azula grabbed Karo's arm and crawled into the dark, damp den. Foxes found these kinds of homes appealing but Karo found the den dark and damp which ended its list of virtues. Azula held up her wand in the den and it gave off a red, rose colored light. It illuminated a scene that even Azula found disturbing. Whatever poison had killed Beria, it made for a painful death. Krasny and his wife had tortured looks on their face while his two cubs had bled from their mouth because they had bitten their tongues as they convulsed. She pushed Karo back toward the entrance although Karo needed no prompting to leave as quickly as possible. "I had hoped to find something more encouraging. A family of four foxes – dead."

"I have a solution to this problem," Azula pushed Karo ahead of her and into the sun of the afternoon. "The first thing we do is kill all the squirrels."

Azula waved her wand gently in the air. She buried the poor foxes in their home and then with a wave of her wand; she covered the entrance as best she could. She did this with a degree of respect and solemnity Karo found out of character for her. When she felt certain the entrance would remain undisturbed she turned to the group. "Life is misery."

* * *

><p>Gobsmack sat on the branch of the oak tree and was waiting for the fairies when they arrived home from their tour of the fox den. He looked every bit like a man with a chip on his shoulder and Azula landed on the branch and given the kind of day she had experienced, decided to take his abuse.<p>

"I have many questions and you will answer them!" Gobsmack declared. "Can you explain all these deaths. Six – yes six people have died this week."

Azula opened the door. "Sadly I know this. Why have you suddenly taken such an interest in this place? In the last few days, you have badgered me about the death of squirrels and sent in Pearlie. I have no answers."

"Fairy HQ has taken an interest in this place in recent times." Gobsmack followed Pearlie inside Azula's little tree house. Ludwig had done some cleaning and he emerged from the kitchen with a tray of snacks and coffee. Of all her guests, Ludwig was the only one who had proven useful and Azula wondered what the Russian minimum wage amounted to.

"What on Earth for?" Azula plopped down on the couch. "Someone in the board of elders decide they need a Gulag for the really rancorous fairies? Hoping to keep the pension plan solvent by reducing fairy folk lifespans?"

"Azula?" Gobsmack said angrily. "Fairyland depends on order. This blighted land needs your help to heal and become whole again and only then will you have your freedom. Fairy HQ needs to know you're on top of things and _doing your job_."

"A grand speech," Azula clapped sarcastically. "If you came to ask me what I know; I can tell you the squirrels have started to act up and kill each other. A squirrel called Beria died of acute poisoning of some sort. You met his corpse."

"Who killed him?" Gobsmack demanded.

Azula shrugged. "Now don't get ahead of me on this. If I knew who killed Beria, I would have something to tell you. Beria died of poisoning and then a fox named Krasny took him home for dinner which proved fatal for _him_ and his family. A second squirrel named Trotsky died of an ax in the back. Trotsky didn't struggle or put up a fight which, yes, is very odd."

"Pearlie!" Gobsmack had his notebook open and wrote these details down. "Anything to add?"

"No sir." Pearlie said quietly. "We asked a few questions of a few scary people. Azula told you everything she knows."

Karo lay on the couch listening to Ludwig snoring as the bat hung on the old student lamp. Karo needed to go to the washroom and he tightened up his robe to make one of his five nightly trips to the washroom. He sat up on the couch, stared off in the darkness, cursed his existence and someone hit him on the head with a heavy rock.

Karo woke up face down on the floor. As his vision came into focus, he noticed a piece of Lego and a splitting kind of headache that taught him that his skull didn't take well to impacts. Morning had come and he could see a large rock and the boots of Azula and Pearlie. Azula helped him to his feet and Pearlie examined him.

"Oh my poor Mistress has been kidnapped!" Ludwig fluttered around the room in hysterics. Karo felt his head explode in pain.

"What happened to you?" Pearlie asked Karo.

"Either a freak meteor from Mars or someone hit me over the head with a freaking rock!" Karo held his head. "I'll have enough concussions for a career in hockey if this keeps up."

"Someone kidnapped Saphira." Pearlie helped poor Karo sit down on the couch.

"Give them time," Karo held his head between his knees as he sat down. "They'll give her back once they come to know her."

"Why?" Ludwig finally perched on Pearlie's left shoulder. "Who would be so evil as to kidnap Mistress Saphira?"

"Lay down and rest." Azula told Karo.

"How awful," Ludwig complained. "I have to go find her! I will come and save my Saphira."

Azula paced the room and opened the door. "We have a note." She came back. "For the Glory of the Revolution!"

"What do they want?" Ludwig flew over to Azula.

Azula read the roughly written Cyrillic characters and translated them for everyone else. She spoke with a stern seriousness. "The squirrels want all of the fairies to leave the Exclusion Zone. If we don't, then we won't see Saphira again."

"Win, win!" Karo mumbled as he pulled the blankets over his head to blot out the morning light.

"Alright!" Azula slammed her fists together and made for the coffee table. "Saphira isn't dead. I don't have that kind of luck." That Azula actually meant what she said, she left to the imagination.

Ludwig's bat ears drooped.

"Never mind." Azula said because Ludwig looked so crestfallen. She knew that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was a vast concrete abomination. Only Reactor Four had exploded but the plant continued generate power using the other three reactors until only a few years ago. "The squirrels had their top secret internment camps and secret interrogation camps in the maze of concrete tunnels underneath the plant. She had read Alexander's writings which detailed these nuclear gulags rather well and her own explorations had given her a clear idea of what the squirrels had going on below where persons never went.

* * *

><p>Azula and Pearlie flew over the old concrete kilns thrown up after the nuclear accident. It looked as solid and functional as the day when persons had constructed it in order to make the concrete needed for the Sarcophagus. Persons simply walked away from the place as soon as they had completed the job. As Pearlie flew over the Sarcophagus that contained the dead reactor, she found it shocking when she saw how little damage the accident had caused. She had somehow expected such a disaster would have leveled the place, not punched a hole in the roof and left the rest of the place in good shape. The morning sun gave her a good view of the entire site but it took a trained eye to find signs of damage. A field in the distance had once contained a forest but the radiation had contaminated the trees and it died. The persons bulldozed it and buried the trees hoping nature would take over and heal the site. The field never recovered. Tough grasses grew but the field remained a gravel covered field which any living thing avoided.<p>

"Lovely sunny day?" Pearlie suggested.

"Look what it lets us see." Azula replied. "Lovely place this." Azula made a slow spiraling descent toward a large building. Azula landed on the tar and gravel roof of Reactor Unit 2. Pearlie landed next to her and looked around carefully.

The scale of the facility overwhelmed fairy folk and Pearlie had never seen a single building as large and sprawling as this complex. Azula remained closed to Azula hoping that she knew the place. Pearlie looked down at a piece of black stuff that looked every bit like coal.

"Graphite. Don't touch it." Azula walked away from Pearlie. "You'll find lots of bits of stuff like that scattered all over this site. When the reactor blew up, it threw up tons of that kind of stuff. You win a prize if you find a piece of a nuclear fuel rod."

"Are we safe here?"

"Pearlie, this place has more ways to kill you than are dreamed of in your philosophy," Azula pointed her wand at a small grate in the roof. A troop of squirrels in olive green clothes poured out of the roof grate and tackled Azula before she could wave her wand.

"Azula?" Pearlie rushed to Azula's side. "Are you okay!"

No!" Azula grabbed a uniformed squirrel and tossed him to one side but two others took her wand and rushed away with it. The squirrels grew quiet as a squirrel, with the gray muzzle of age came up from the vent in the roof and looked sternly at Azula. He carried a dark gray box with a large red button on it.

"Glory on the day of the Great Revolution," He spoke Fairy with a Russian accent that could only be considered menacing. A group of squirrels now numbering twelve held Azula down on the gravel and tar roof of the building. "Tell your friend to back off!"

Pearlie had her wand out as the imposing, great, gray and very evil looking squirrel pointed at her.

"Who are you?" Pearlie asked quietly.

"Tupolev!" The squirrel had a strong, deep voice and grasped the dark gray box. "Leader and purifier of the _Communist Paradise_ known as the _Exclusion Zone_."

Azula asked as twelve fat squirrels sat on her. "What have you done to Saphira?"

"No harm will come to her if you fairy folk leave the Zone." Tupolev pushed open a clear cover and his little squirrel hand hovered over the red button. "If you don't leave, I will unleash a new disaster on all of you. We rigged Yelena with explosives and I have the control in my hand." Tupolev raised the control over his head.

"You'd kill Yelena?" Pearlie backed up and looked to Tupolev with horror.

Azula grew cold in spite of having a dozen squirrels sitting on her. "Pay attention Pearlie. Yelena isn't a person."

Tupolev stamped his foot impatiently.

"A fairy?" Pearlie asked.

"A two thousand tone reactor lid." Azula spat out. "When Reactor Four exploded, it threw the huge metal lid out of the reactor and the lid landed back inside balanced on broken steam pipes. Some Russian scientist with a sick sense of humor named it after his wife. If Yelena the reactor lid flops over or falls all the way into the reactor then it could unleash a massive spill of radioactive dust. If you move and he presses that button, we all die."

Pearlie pondered this.

Azula didn't know why but she didn't trust Tupolev. "If you bring us Saphira we'll go away and leave the Zone. I'm sure Gobsmack can find a nice hell hole for me to run."

"I have no choice!" Tupolev smiled as a swarm of squirrels spilled onto the roof in a precision that Pearlie found frighteningly viscous and precise. They lacked strength but made up for that in sheer numbers and bloody minded dedication to the cause. They swarmed Pearlie, took her wand and she screamed.

* * *

><p>Karo looked at Ludwig. "This is it! We're all going to die." A dim sodium light bathed Karo, Ludwig and Saphira in a pale pink, orange hue that drowned out all color. The room had the same damp, moldy smell all the rooms in the building had. Persons had abandoned it to the elements. Karo struggled against the twelve gauge electrical wire the squirrels had used to tie his arms to an old cold water pipe.<p>

"You don't think Pearlie and Azula will come to rescue us?" Saphira's voice shook. "I'll die in the middle of Russia chained to pipes with my bat Ludwig and you?" Saphira looked around the small concrete room. Sticky white paint had turned a ghastly yellow and peeled off the concrete and the walls had cracks and holes all over it. A layer of dust covered everything and Saphira wondered if she was going to die in Russia without a memorial. She looked up at a large metal pipe with vents coming off of it which had asbestos paper falling off of it and wondered how death could be worse.

"Where are we?" Ludwig asked. "Those awful squirrels stuffed me in a bag and I found myself tied up here."

"Reactor Unit Four," Karo looked around at the bare walls. "A staff coffee room I think."

"And the squirrels intend to kill us?" Saphira asked quietly.

Karo wanted to scratch his sore head. "The mean one named Yuribasov that kept biting me hinted at some kind of explosion to purify the Zone and prepare it for the coming revolution." The flashing sodium light did nothing to make thinking easy as the thing had seen better days and was burning out. It made Karo's brain want to jump out and flee for a better place to live when he looked at it. Karo wondered if Hell's waiting room looked something like this dingy place. "If we survive I may need shots since Yuribasov didn't look at all clean."

"This place smells like dirt." Saphira complained as she struggled against the ropes.

Karo considered this. "We'll have a word with the cleaning crew if we survive." Karo could hear the dull hum of electrical current in the wires and it hurt his head. He had underestimated the power of the unruly mob: the squirrels had kicked down the door and simply beat him into submission. He imagined they had other plans for Pearlie and Azula and lured them out with the ransom note. Even if he could escape the squirrels had taken both his and Saphira's wand. He knew the dark rooms of the Sarcophagus but a wrong turn in the winding maze of contaminated passages could kill in moments.

"I could fly for help?" Ludwig offered. "Maybe I can chew my way free?"

"You don't know this place." Karo told the poor bat. "You might stumble into a zone of high radiation and you'd die. That wouldn't do us much good."

Twelve uniformed squirrels shoved Azula into the room and another twelve shoved Pearlie into the room. Both fairies were tied up in old red twelve gauge electrical wire.

"Hi." Azula said morbidly. "This is it. We're all going to die."

"The squirrels hinted at a huge bomb." Karo wanted to _scratch_ his head. "Could the little Commies have built_ The_ Bomb?"

"Get real." Azula sat next to Karo. "They rigged Yelena with a bomb so Tupolev – the ugly old Commie squirrel – can blow it up and the reactor lid will topple over, the Sarcophagus falls in and the radioactive dust will kill us all."

Even as a cute squirrel, Tupolev left little to like for those who found squirrels 'cute'. He scowled and looked angry and as Azula listened to him walking down the hall, she heard him yelling loudly and very rudely at one of his underlings about Communist and Socialist theory. He entered the room trailed by two uniformed squirrels. He still clung to the dark gray box and he scowled in a kind of condescending way.

"We claim this victory in the glorious cause of the revolution." He held up the box. "We have all the fairy wands and we have all the fairies."

"Can't we talk?" Pearlie asked quietly.

"No!" Tupolev shouted. "I wanted you all to know the totality of our victory. Soon we'll go into hiding in our shelters, locked away from the hideous fate that awaits you. In an hour, our bombs will go off and you _will_ all die." Pearlie heard her first really evil laugh in her entire life. "We leave now! Yuribasov, Arzanov! Follow me. We will abandon these Bourgeoisie enemies to their fate. The dust cloud will deal with rest of our foes in the Zone. Celebrate Comrades for victory is ours!" The trio turned around and stomped away. A band of squirrels came out of the hall and lined up in formation. They slammed the heavy rust covered metal door to the room which locked with a sinister click.


	3. Chapter 3

**Pearlie the Park Fairy**

**Saphira's New Assignment – Chapter 3**

The squirrels had tied Azula and Pearlie's arms securely but left their legs free and both of them tried to force the door open. Pearlie had her arms tied behind her back but she tried to force the rusty steel door open by kicking it but it was jammed shut. Azula tried her best to accomplish the same feat but the door didn't even make a pretense of budging.

Pearlie sat down next to Saphira and decided to ask the expert on nuclear matters. "What will happen Azula?" Pearlie asked with some dignity.

"Dust," Azula remained standing. "This place has tons of radioactive dust made up of plutonium and other nasty stuff. The persons built the Sarcophagus to keep the dust in one place because if it leaked out and blew away, it could cause a disaster worse than anything that has gone before. The reactor lid rests inside the reactor vessel like a badly balanced manhole cover and given the right push, it'll fall in." Azula made all the needed motions to elaborate her point. "The persons built the Sarcophagus on the damaged foundations of the building in a huge hurry and _it's_ rickety. I put good money the when Yelena falls over, the Sarcophagus will fall down and the resulting radioactive release will threaten a hundred million people. We won't live long enough to see that because the radioactive dust will cook us or the falling rubble will crush us."

"I can't die on this rock," Saphira collapsed.

"We'll be fine, you'll see." Pearlie told Saphira in her comforting way as she patted her shoulder. "We'll find our way back to Jubilee Park and you'll have your spa with Ludwig doing all your cleaning."

"Do you know something I don't?" Azula asked with a hint of irritation in her voice at the seemingly unending supply of optimism from Pearlie.

A vent from the heating grate fell to the floor and sent up a cloud of moldy dust. A loud clang rang through the room and then everyone heard a soft thud.

"Communism is bad for business? Yes?" A familiar set of ginger eyes examined the group. "A cat always lands on his feet although given my years of fine caviar and vodka dinners I had my doubts for a moment."

"Zdanov!" Karo exclaimed in surprise. "I don't understand?"

Zdanov walked proudly around the room, "Beria came to me for and made a series of 'special orders' of high explosives and blasting caps. Trotsky had the job of finding the _Complex Expedition_ maps of this place." The dark gray cat flicked his tail. Azula knew the _Complex Expedition_ were the unfortunate scientists that had the job of mapping the reactor building, the damage and what had happened to the hundred and forty tons of fuel. They had a sad job and sad lives but their maps were the best made of the entire damaged reactor. "Squirrels with high explosives – ha! I know those low life twits better than that! I sold him defective highway flares. Squirrels are bad for business." Zdanov looked at Saphira for a moment but the fairy dare not look up. "Tupolev is the worst of a bad lot. He has gone quite mad, paranoid and drunk with power. He gave Beria and Trotsky poison and gave them orders to take it once their part of the plan was completed. Tupolev feared that a live squirrel could tell tales; he had no such worries about the dead ones once he had no use for them." Zdanov spit as he spoke." Beria took his poison; Trotsky lost his nerve. Tupolev had him killed – I think Yuribasov did the dirty work."

"I have many questions." Azula struggled in her ropes. "I will demand many answers. For the moment can you help us all get out of here and stop Tupolev?"

Zdanov had the fine reflexes of a cat and after a few attempts had Azula free from her wire. A set of yellow wire nuts hit the floor when she stood up. She began working to free Pearlie.

"Thank you Zdanov, but I have to know how you found us?" Karo said as Pearlie freed him from the wires.

"I followed the squirrels," Zdanov smiled evilly, "never forget I'm a cat. I can sneak up on anything at anytime. Never forget that when you borrow money."

"Thank you Zdanov." Pearlie untied her cousin Saphira. "Why did _you_ come to rescue us?"

"Azula is good for business!" Zdanov gave a cat like grin as he pranced around the room. "She knows the Zone and she lets us alone to do business. Fairy Headquarters may not like it, but we find her hands off approach suits us just fine."

"Good to go Ludwig," Karo looked at the rusty steel door as he set Ludwig free. "Where we can go remains a mystery since they locked us in here."

"Communist made doors. After thirty years in this dank space," Azula began to push and kick at the door. "I bet the metal is no good."

Pearlie and Karo began to push. Zdanov scratched at a small keyhole with his sharp claws and with a click and the sound of metal breaking, the door slid open, a cloud of rust rose in the air and all of them tumbled out of the room.

Azula was in no mood to meed squirrels. She found two squirrels posted outside the door and she punched each on roundly in the face and smashed their heads together. Zdanov pushed their unconscious bodies into the room where they had been held. Azula and Pearlie shoved the door closed.

"Follow me." Zdanov said as he quietly laughed. "Don't forget where this room is, I may need a snack later, have a few friends over for dinner. Please keep it quiet!"

"You have so much anger for a fairy," Pearlie told Azula in the best way she could – utterly frankly. "What will you do when we defeat the squirrels?"

"Those stupid squirrels will be mashed into a pulp and fed to pigs."

"You can't mean that!" Pearlie whispered in indignation.

Ludwig helped Saphira to her feet and guided her along the dim hallway.

Zdanov gave Azula and Pearlie a stern look intended to tell them to shut up. He led them up a steep set of concrete stairs and then out a door that had half fallen off its hinges onto a long catwalk that led in the direction of the other reactors. Gray cloud has settled in and the drizzling rain came down. Pearlie realized the reactor complex at Chernobyl covered a massive area. Jubilee Park covered a bit over a hundred acres and Pearlie knew from experience that it was a large city park. The Chernobyl Reactor Complex – a single building made of many sections whose function she didn't understand - sprawled over many times that area. An area ten times larger had support buildings, transformer yards, acres of transformers in the sub stations. In spite of the industrial nature of the station, Pearlie knew it its day, the plant had sprawling lawns the size of golf courses with well groomed lawns, healthy trees and pleasant park spaces for the workers.

"How do we defeat Tupolev?" Karo asked Zdanov defensively. "He has all of our wands and he has an army of squirrels."

"Not only were the explosives defective," Zdanov whispered as he scanned the grounds for squirrels. "I gave the squirrels outdated maps to the complex. The scientists of the _Complex Expedition_ listed every bolt, detail and cement block used to make this place. When the Soviet Empire fell apart and the _Complex Expedition_ finished its work, responsibility for this place fell to EDF – a French electric utility." Zdanov's ears twitched as he listened for trouble. "Even with one reactor destroyed, the persons needed the power and couldn't shut the plant down since the other three reactors produced much needed power. The French operators made many changes to improve safety such as adding fire suppression systems, plumbing changes and other things that could help us."

"I hate to think that the French somehow play a role in helping us," Azula scowled. "In the Great Patriotic War, I recall the French simply rolled up their flag in the face of the Fascist Hoards."

Zdanov pushed them back. "Keep low, quiet and follow me."

Azula counted the number of times Saphira had said 'ew' as the team crawled behind Zdanov through the haunted innards of the dead power plant. That is not to say that the innards of the dead power plant didn't make most sane souls feel queasy but Azula felt that Saphira had begun to state the bleeding obvious. Spiderwebs hung on the inside of heavy metal vents and the dust had an ample amount of mouse and rat excrement mixed in just the right amount to make crawling through it a lesson in nasty.

Zdanov kicked out a rusty grate, passed it back to Azula and jumped to the floor of Reactor Number Two Control Room. Azula began to wonder what Zdanov had in mind as he paced the floor waiting for the others to fly or fall out of the dusty vent.

Karo peered out of the dusty vent and looked around. "Where have the squirrels gone?"

"They have gone into hiding," Zdanov solemnly said. "The little cowards have hidden themselves in the radiation proof passages underneath the intact parts of the building."

Pearlie looked around the room. She found herself in a beige room filled with alien persons contraptions, levers, dials and push buttons. Aqua colored metal control panels rose out of the floor and had more levers and lights on them. Old Staples padded office chairs still stood in rows in front of the consoles with a coating of dust and dung on their black fabric.

"Ew." Saphira noticed the banal industrial ugliness of the room.

Azula hit her upside the head. "We know this place is ugly." Azula stood at the wall at a bank of lights that once lit up to indicate the status of the fuel and control rods. At two meters across, it looked a good deal like a round stadium scoreboard. If we can focus? Can you lock the doors on both side of this room? Pearlie?"

Pearlie and Ludwig flew across the room and pulled the bolt to lock the blue painted steel double doors at each end.

"What now?" Karo hovered over a large group of red buttons.

"Even if we can drive the squirrels out, they outnumber us." Azula said.

Zdanov waved his tail proudly. "I have dealt with that. The foxes didn't take well to the death of one of their own so we have their help."

"Won't they kill all the squirrels?" Pearlie asked with concern.

"That depends on Azula."

Pearlie turned to Azula. "No killing – please?"

Zdanov walked under a console and spoke with cat like detachment. "How do you like your squirrel? Living or dead?"

"Kill them all and let God sort them out; if God doesn't exist the're out of luck." Azula offered. "We won't be killing them, the foxes will. We simply have to find a way of driving them out of hiding."

"Azula!" Pearlie scolded. "We can't kill the squirrels.

"What do you want me to do?" Azula hovered over another set of controls. "The foxes have every right to their revenge."

"No killing! Enough is enough!" Pearlie crossed her arms.

"I see. I have no choice in this. If I defy you and you report that to Fairy HQ I'll wind up dying here." Azula sighed. Pearlie had a sweet and caring nature but was a highly respected, powerful and high placed fairy and Azula couldn't afford to defy her if she wished to leave this place. "We still have to find a way of flushing out the Communists. Can we find anyone named McCarthy?"

"You might think I'm a stupid fairy who cares more about fashion but I may have an idea." Saphira flew over and slapped Azula back for good measure. "As for moi, I want to live. After all this is over, you can banish the squirrels if you want or Pearlie can groom their tails. In my glass house we had a fire putter outer system. When it went off, water came down from the ceiling like a huge storm and fire putter outer people came and checked things out."

Azula scratched her head trying to decide what to do. Saphira had a brilliant idea. The power station had a fire and dust suppression system that used a combination of water and nasty chemicals. It wouldn't kill the squirrels (although it might drown a few) but the eye blistering water would make them think twice about staying and having their hair burned off. "The snooty fairy has a plan." Azula said coldly.

"We won't kill the squirrels?" Pearlie asked.

"No...bu they will have quite the rash."

"You won't kill them?" Pearlie asked even more urgently.

Azula looked at Karo who shook his head. "No...but the whole lot will have to leave for Siberia. Call it a Russian tradition."

Azula knew this place inside and out.

She flew around with Karo and tapped the gauges and checked for power. The power plant had not died completely and persons came regularly to check the safety systems and measure the water in the spent fuel ponds. Even though the persons had shut the plant down, they couldn't simply take things apart. The three intact reactor cores had gone cold but the fuel – radioactive in the extreme – had been transferred to huge pools with cooling water pumped in constantly.

Pearlie hovered above Azula. "Have you set everything up?"

"If persons have kept things working, then yes." Azula and Karo worked a dial. "Keep in mind persons _will_ show up once this system trips. Saphira's fire putter outer persons will show up to see if anything has happened. We have about twenty minutes from when the fire sprinklers go off until persons show up."

"I have your word?" Pearlie flew down next to Karo. "No killing?"

"Yes!" Azula sighed and hoped the foxes waiting outside the plant would agree to those terms. Azula had bigger fish to fry. Saphira's plan depended upon having the automatic fire and dust suppression systems in working order. Nothing guaranteed they would obey an injunction from the control rooms – they had a reputation for blithely ignoring injunctions from their own smoke detectors or tripping off for no reason at all. She had read the manuals but had no idea if they bore any relationship to reality. She adjusted controls to prevent the control room and adjacent passages from getting soaked. She looked at the dials and lights and waited.

Karo paced his control console. His foot stuck in one of those ring marks that a person had left behind when they had placed an overfilled cup of coffee on the console. He hated his life. He did his job as assistant park fairy but always knew in the back of his mind that the park fairy job market had little demand for a fairy who knew where radioactive hotspots were based on mutations in the local flowers. He had recently acquired the original Cowboy Bebop episodes through Zdanov on DVD (not the badly dubbed Russian ones on VHS) and Karo wished to watch the missing episodes.

"Karo! Pay attention!" Azula's crisp voice rang out like an artillery piece and Karo snapped to attention. None of the other fairies could read Russian (or the French sticky labels on the controls) so Karo had to make sure nothing unforeseen happened. He had to take swift action if a pump kicked out because the water induced a short or because someone in the control room belched. She had it on good authority the reactors had long been emptied. This meant that the used fuel sat in two huge pools of water and the plant had always had flaky wiring. Reactor Unit 3 had a fine safety record in spite of the fact the control rods used to shut down the reactor refused to lower into the reactor unless a staff member called for a Caramilk bar from the third floor staffroom vending machine. Rather than fight this, they kept the machine stocked with Caramilk bars.

"We are such things as dreams are made on," Azula heard a series of popping sounds. Zdanov made a slicing motion with his paw across his throat and Azula hit a sequence of red back lit mushroom buttons. "And each of our little lives is rounded by a sleep."

Karo felt a dull thump coming from over his head. The water stained white ceiling tiles shook for a moment. No needles moved and no dim indicator lights grew in brightness. He knew this could mean nothing more than the persons hadn't wired them.

Pearlie gasped.

Saphira had no clue what had taken place but she huddled with Ludwig under the wall of status lights that showed nothing whatsoever was happening with the reactor. .

The control room creaked as did the building.

A loud siren began to wail in all the rooms of the complex. Birds on the electric lines nad trees nearby flew up into the air startled by the din.

Azula watched the dials move as water towers and pumps kicked in to supply the sprinkler system with water. An electrical signal traveled along the water lines and squibs broke the sprinklers open and they sprayed water into the bowels of the building. She had taken care to set off the sprinklers inside the Sarcophagus to prevent the flares from setting things on fire.

Karo tapped the dials on his panel but nothing happened. A large red phone on Karo's control console rang and a light next to it lit up. Karo flew back and snagged the cord. The red phone fell to the floor and Karo's felicate ears picked up a person's voice.

"We've had several fire alarms at the reactor. Hello?" An authoritative male voice came out of the ear phone. Karo looked to Azula apologetically.

"What do I say?" Karo whispered.

"Hello?"

"Saphira?" Azula pointed at her. "Come up with a convincing lie."

"But I don't speak a word of Russian!" Saphira clutched her hand to her chest and declared emphatically.

"Is OK," Karo half whispered, "I speak Russian real good. I will whisper what to say in your ear and you will speak into the phone."

"Hello?"

Saphira leaned over the earpiece and realized she understood nothing about nuclear anything. They didn't teach that kind of thing in Fairy School so how Azula knew so much bewildered her.

"Hello?" The voice from the red phone spoke loudly. "Is anyone there?"

"Just imitate me." Karo whispered into Saphira's ear. He noticed a brief look of disgust cross her face. "Play up your charm and grace though. Lie convincingly."

"Hello!" Saphira used her most mellifluous voice but struggled to make her Russian sound as good as Karo's who spat out Russian words like a winged Solzhenitsyn. "We have had a malfunction due to faults caused by vermin. We have no problems at present."

"We had fire and dust alarms go off from your location." The voice paused. He worked in Kiev at the power utility headquarters and he didn't really want to dump unionized workers off at the plant in the Exclusion Zone. If nothing had gone wrong, they were apt to file grievances and if something had gone wrong then medical insurance premiums would go up. "Should we send the emergency services up to investigate?"

"That won't be necessary." Saphira's euphonious voice convinced the man on the other end of the phone and he hung up.

"Horosho!" Karo nodded. "With that silver tongue, you should go into advertising."

"How long with the water keep running?" Pearlie flew over Azula as she asked.

Azula had no idea but knew a set of water towers fed the system. She knew no way of shutting off the water and once the squibs had detonated and the sprinklers began to spray, they would continue as long as they had water to feed them. The towers had pumps to feed them which meant the sprinklers would continue until someone shut the pumps off. "I don't know?"

"What if the squirrels don't leave their hiding places?" Pearlie crossed her arms.

Azula searched for a less morbid reply to that question than 'squirrel soup' as she stood on the console. "I don't know." Azula knew at some point another set of pumps would come one and drain the water into a large concrete lined tank the persons had built after the accident.

Yuribasov could see nothing in the fog of acidic water that filled the concrete lined room beneath the cooling pond. He felt as if the water had begun to pickle him alive. He couldn't understand why he had not heard a loud explosion and the sound of the Sarcophagus crumbling.

Tupolev stumbled around making random circles in the dark corridors of the basement of the building. He had seen a whole division of his squirrels, soaked and blinded by the brackish water take to flight. He had tried to stop them but the sound of rushing water and the fear of death from invisible nuclear terror deafened them to his words. They decided to flee and try their luck with the harsh Azula than with the haunted nuclear plant. The rest had decided to flee by any route possible and he found himself alone searching for loyal comrades.

Yuribasov fell against Tupolev.

"The fairies may only banish us!" Yuribasov fell against his comrade. "This place will kill us!"

Tupolev pulled out a sharp steel needle, sharp as a dagger and stabbed Yuribasov in the eye. "We fail only if we don't have Communist courage."

Yuribasov died before he struck the ground.

The lights had gone out when the sprinklers came on and Tupolev had to feel along the coarse concrete of the hallway as the water rushed down over his head. He felt heavy, wet and the water burned his skin. He had hoped to hear the loud humming of the cooling pumps that kept water flowing over the spent fuel rods in the pool above his head. He stumbled in a large room under the pool and felt around. The room had a large drain with the floor sloped toward it and the water flowed into it through the metal grate making a sound as loud as a waterfall.

The tank Azula referred to consisted of a huge concrete tank set up to collect water and waste runoff from any leaking pipes from the pool or the sprinklers. This allowed the storage of the radioactive runoff in one place so persons could decontaminate it and then pump it out into the river. The pumps that drew water into this tank turned on and all the drains in the floor drew in water at an increasing pace.

Tupolev felt the shift and could see a funnel forming at the drain. He reached for a pipe but his hands could not grab the pipe and the heat burned them. He fell to the ground as the water and air began to rush into the drain in the floor. Tupolev tumbled across the floor and stuck flat against the grate. He felt the water and air pushing against him in a mighty flood. He hung on to the metal grate of the drain until a piece of broken concrete the size of a chestnut worked loose by the water smashed into his head. He let go of the metal grate stunned by the impact and spun down into the void.

Everyone in the Control Room heard the sound of person's feet and a person tried the door.

"We're leaving!" Azula announced. She motioned everyone into the vent. Zdanov made a leap and clawed his way in. Saphira followed him with Ludwig close behind. Pearlie and Karo followed behind them. They rattled down the vent as quickly as the not so lithe Zdanov could move.

"Open up!" The person yelled. Karo heard a loud thump as the door fell in. They scurried to the roof and they could see a dozen drab green military vehicles and two fire engines in the main road. Persons poured into the building with great purpose.

Zdanov watched all of this with great interest as he found persons a fascinating kind of monkey.

"I see the foxes chasing the squirrels." He said almost as if it were obvious for everyone to see and pointed his head over to a large but overgrown lawn behind the main complex building.

"I wanted no killing." Pearlie wailed.

Karo could see the welcome sight of the red foxes chasing the squirrels as if herding cattle but saw no evidence of killing. The foxes made no attempt to close in although as he knew they couldrun down any small animal if they put their legs into it. Pearlie flew off with Azula chasing after her as Karo watched.

"Pearlie!" Azula cried out. "This place is crawling with persons!"

"I said no killing!" Pearlie turned to face Azula and for a moment Karo waited.

Azula put her hands on Pearlie's shoulders. "I know the foxes here. They are good and honest and won't kill."

"How do you know that?" Pearlie cried.

Azula patted her back. "They won't do anything until I give the word. I may not agree with your way of thinking but I gave my word."

Two tired looking firemen in black gear wearing oxygen labored to cross the lawn with a a fire hose. They tumbled under the weight of the gear and because the lawn had generations of oversized moles making holes in it. One of them shook his head and wondered why he caught a glimpse of foxes herding uniformed squirrels. He had work to do and perhaps, he thought, the fear of this place had gotten to him.

The foxes herded the squirrels into the fields of the old horse ranch and squatted down on their hindquarters. Pearlie found this an amazing sight – dozens of beautiful red Russian foxes sitting in a circle in the middle of the field. Azula flew over the circle of foxes and hovered in the midst of the foxes. They all bowed their heads. Saphira couldn't understand any of this as she hovered at a distance with Ludwig, Karo and Pearlie.

"I am Kurov, leader of my people and patron of my pack." He bowed to Azula as she hovered just above the tall grass. Pearlie had never seen a more beautiful animal – a bright red fox with a white muzzle but a steady voice and the kind of eyes that showed a great intellect.

"I am Kamna, the matron of my pack and seer of our people." Pearlie saw in her a wise old woman and a mystic. She saw not the bumbling Aunt Garnet of Jubilee Park but a wise and gentle old woman. "I have seen in Azula, the reincarnation of the Spirit of the Fox and knew she would protect us from harm in this land. She had given us protection, good homes and she has given us this land with its hunting grounds. We have freedom from harm from persons and the freedom to live as free foxes. I believe she came here as a fairy to guard our kind in this poisoned land and allow us to prosper."

Pearlie knew spirits sometimes reincarnated themselves as fairies to protect their people. She could understand Azula now, in her dress and bearing it made sense and she felt humbled.

"What is your verdict?" Kurov asked with his head bowed.

Azula looked at Pearlie then to Karo. "The foxes have always stood for loyalty, intelligence, kindness, beauty." She looked to Karo, Saphira and Pearlie. "Will my friends please come forward?"

Karo, Pearlie and Saphira flew slowly forward over the head of the foxes bowing down.

"Each one of these fairies helped deliver the squirrels to justice." Azula spoke grandly. "Karo has served me well as a companion – I could not have wished for a better fairy to serve at my side. He descended from the spirits of the forest in the distant land of Japan and their traditions. He represents loyalty."

The foxes bowed.

"Pearlie comes from a long line of fairies who cared for persons parks in all parts of the world. She has a belief in the goodness of all and lends her helping hand to anyone." Azula said loudly. "She represents kindness."

The foxes bowed.

"Saphira comes from the same line as Pearlie." Azula spoke as the foxes bowed. "She has never fit in and never felt accepted. She forgets that the most beautiful things were ignored in their time. She represents beauty."

"You represent great intelligence." The foxes shouted out in stunning unity. "Our fairy Azula."

"Each one of us must speak." Azula spoke. "We will not decide the fate of the squirrels alone."

"How do you decide?" Kamna asked as she raised her head and her green eyes looked at Azula.

"Will they live in peace here?" Azula asked. "A reasonable person wants to see if they have learned their lesson. We want a peaceful community. If they live peacefully but turn over their leaders for banishment then I will accept this."

"I see." Kamna said with her head bowed. "Pearlie! Please speak your mind."

Pearlie slowly hovered over the grass. "I want no one to suffer. This is their home. I agree with Azula."

"I see" Kanma said. "What about you Karo."

"What will the squirrels do?" Karo answered. "it depends on them. If they will live peacefully with all of us I see not reason to punish them. If they continue to violate our community then they must be banished."

"Saphira?" Kanma asked. "As a mother I can tell you have suffered much. You suffer because you think your cousin is better and more respected than you. You represent beauty and so you must speak."

"I can't thin..." Saphira cried. No one had ever understood her. "Um?" She patted her cobweb themed blue dress. "Harmony is beauty. Will they live in harmony?"

"I consider the Retro Cartoon channel the greatest innovation in television since the invention of the HD television. Where else can you watch reruns of the Smurfs at midnight." Karo exclaimed as he sat down on the brown couch and pushed the buttons on the remote. He had made a routine practice of watching cartoon reruns in his red night robe. "I have always harbored this deeply troubling theory about Smurfette."

"I won't be leaving this place." Saphira said as she reclined on her chair. "Perfect Pearlie will get all the credit and accolades and I'll be stuck watching the Smurfs with you and Ludwig."

"Mistress can start a new spa?" Ludwig suggested as he hung from the lamp.

"I think the Smurfs are a metaphor for the ancient Spartans." Karo spoke off the top of his head. "The Smurfs are the perfect homosexual society."

"You two shut up or I start banging your heads together!" Azula shouted from her room. "Trying to sleep here."

A quieter Saphira spoke next, "Azula and I_ don't_ get along."

"Don't mind her," Karo chuckled as he pulled the blankets over himself and relaxed on the couch. "She has her good moods." Karo yawned.

"I have to sleep out here on the reclining chair." Saphira said sadly. "Perfect Pearlie got your room."

"I actually prefer it this way," Karo yawned again. "Perky cousin Pearlie is a very nice fairy but you're an interesting and somewhat neurotic one."

"Thanks," Saphira whispered.

The odd melody of the theme song for the Jetsons filled the room.

"You helped us," Karo said as he retreated under the covers. "I'll see that they know this."

Saphira blushed.

"Is that the Jetsons?" Azula came out of her room. She smoothed out her red night robe and sat on the floor.

"Why are you up?" Karo asked quietly.

"Can't sleep." Azula answered abruptly. "The two of you keep yapping."

"We should keep quiet or we'll wake up Pearlie," Azula reached for the remote sitting on the coffee table. "I hate it when you screw up the picture so everything gets long and stretched out." Azula pressed a button and the picture went back to having black bars on the side. "I should ask Saphira if she wants to stay here. I think she likes you – Karo. Whether or not that means she's going stay by your side in this radioactive hell hole..."

"Mistress is fussy about the company she keeps." Ludwig answered from his perch more out of a sense of hope he would not have to share Saphira's freindship.

Azula found the swiftness with which Saphira hit him with a pillow surprising.

Karo sat next to Saphira and they watched the sun set perched on the large branch outside of the entrance to their house. Pearlie had departed earlier that day but Fairy HQ insisted that Saphira serve some time with Azula and Karo. Gobsmack had made that very clear and now Azula had arranged with local woodpeckers for a new room to suit Saphira's needs and had a special perch on order for Ludwig.

"I will admit I never understood what the big deal was about sunsets." Saphira said bluntly.

"Who the hell made the mess in the kitchen?" Azula shouted from inside the house. "Saphira! When you cook at home does the cleanup require a corp of army engineers?"

Karo heard the zap of Azula's wand. "Are you sure you will be able to handle living with us?"

"I have to get used to you and your cousin?" Saphira spoke softly.

Azula came out the front door and sat on the branch with Karo and Saphira. "Our sunsets would look better if we lived on a planet with a binary star system. Now that you and Ludwig will be staying with us for some time, I should go over some ground rules. You are here for a sod of a long time."

"I know." Saphira wrapped her arms around her legs as she sat on the branch.

"You left a mess in the kitchen."

"Ludwig made dinner." Saphira answered back.

"Both of you should learn Russian then." Azula recommended. "What he thought was Vegemite was _not_." Azula tapped her wand. "The Russians make a kind of instant coffee you can spread on bread. Don't count on getting much sleep tonight."

"And the fairy bread?" Saphira asked.

"Some kind of Swedish cracker that never goes bad. Best before June 1998 which means it tastes exactly the same fresh as when it's gone off."

"And the honey?" Saphira asked.

"A gift from the Queen of Cesium Flats," Azula answered. "Most of the time, you can trust the honey bottle to contain honey. You can use_ the Karo Procedure_ to test the content of our various jars, containers and boxes."

"_The Karo Procedure?_" Saphira said doubtfully.

"If you come across something that might be icky or gross, hand it to Karo and have him taste it." Azula raised her hands. "It worked until he chugged a whole bottle of _Milk of Magnesia_ because he thought fresh milk had a minty taste."

"We don't get fresh milk here," Karo blushed.

"Only in the Soviet Union!" Azula complained as she sloshed through the kitchen in her boots. She held her wand and began to wave it. "Send rockets into space – not a problem. Plumbing? Oh no, that lies in a whole other realm of expertise."

"Eww!" Saphira walked in the kitchen with a copy of _the Morning Myth_. "Do you know the Morning Myth has a half page story on Perfect Cousin Pearlie." She stood at the edge of the pond of water and continued. "They say that she went on a humanitarian mission to the Ukraine and did great things to beautify this place."

"We have a leak under the sink," Azula made a graceful motion with her wand, it glowed a gentle red and the water vanished. "At first I thought it might be Karo's small bladder but he denied it when I smacked his nose with a paper. What's this about Perfect Cousin Pearlie?"

"The Morning Myth!" Saphira tapped the paper impatiently. "They always have stories about how Jubilee Park is the finest park in fairyland, about Pearlie and her skills as a park fairy and on and on."

"I know." Azula said calmly as she put her hands on her hips. "I visited there once and saw it for myself. I saw my first cane toad and almost my last down by the duck pond – given that the cane toad is a horribly invasive species in her country, keeping them alive seems to be a big mistake. My first park had a python escape from the zoo so parks have problems."

"Where's Karo?" Saphira hoped for a more sympathetic ear than the stern Azula.

"He went out to check on rumors of a homeless persons camp in the forest across the river from the old power plant." Azula peered under the sink and shook the pipes. "He due for another one of your wing polishes?"

"I have to keep using my skills." Saphira looked at her nails. "I could give you a wing polish, maybe buff and paint your nails."

Just don't turn Karo into a sissy." Azula spoke with her usual mix of candor and dry wit. She had her wand in her hand and her head under the sink. "Can you check the fridge?"

"What am I looking for?"

"A leak," Azula pulled her head up from the sink.

"Eww!" Saphira looked inside the fridge which actually had once been a hospital sample fridge and saw a gray, furry salad.

"You can have that if you want."

"Ludwig!" Saphira shouted.

"Yes Mistress!" Ludwig flew into the kitchen.

Saphira pointed at the furry food. "Can you explain that?"

"I wanted to get rid of it but I didn't want to touch it." Ludwig pleaded.

"You found Rustislav," Azula looked at the salad inside the old Russian fridge, "our salad from the disco era."

Saphira strode into the kitchen and found Karo examining the salad named Rustislav while Ludwig cowered in a corner. Azula followed her into the kitchen.

"We can't eat Rustislav!" Azula told Karo. "He's part of the family!"

"Ew!" Saphira muttered.

Karo looked at the gray, hairy dish in his hands. "We had thought this was a salad. You have spent two weeks with us and should know that you should never assume that things are as they seem."

"Azula and I spent the morning trying to find a nice location for our spa." Saphira sounded grim. "We had no luck."

"I liked the T 34 tank on the edge of the city outside the armory." Azula said as she went into the living room. "Think of your spa as a heritage site that commemorates the Great patriotic War. We don't have any glass houses with glass in them and the classiest building in town – the railway station – has no roof." She waved her hand dismissively as she left the room. "Fresh coat of paint and you'd hardly know it once ran over German soldiers."

Karo kept examining the gray furry salad with some trepidation. "We heisted our fridge from a vet clinic on the edge of town but we never bothered to clean it – did we?"

"Ew!" Saphira said.

"We grabbed the smallest fridge we could find," Azula hardly remembered or cared where they had lifted their various pieces of kit. She had spent so much time in _the Exclusion Zone_ that the days and flowed into weeks, months and years and then the least interesting details of her life in the Zone had crossed her _Memory Event Horizon_ and vanished in a puff of crushed aspirations.

"Do you remember when we got Rustislav?"

"Get to the point!" Azula snapped. "I barely remember my middle name!"

"Keiko," Karo said but then held up the dish containing Rustislav. "We have no sheep in the Exclusion Zone and I wondered about this fact since the Zone has every other invasive species like wild horses, kudzu, raccoons, rats, cats, foxes, a herd of cows and chickens. We'd have alligators or crocodiles if the winter didn't freeze them to death. Rustislav isn't a salad; it's an anthrax culture."

"Oh," Azula looked to Saphira half expecting her to say 'ew' but Saphira remained quiet. "Is it the ordinary, why did my heard of sheep or newspaper editor croak type anthrax or the weaponized kind?"

"Weaponized..." Karo answered in the affirmative as he read off the bottom of the dish. "Probably used by the Russian military to test on sheep because – things at the time could hardly get worse."

"Ew!" Saphira finally said. "You mean we could all die of anthrax."

"Only Ludwig," Azula said confidently. "We don't have mammalian biology or warm blood. Fairy experts think we evolved from the insects and that culture has long since past its prime. Ludwig has lived here and I haven't yet had to do an autopsy."


End file.
